Food, Fights
‘Men on the DRagon’ helmer Sunny Chan goes 2-for-2 with his sophomore film, a LUnar New year Mid-Autumn Festival family dramedy.
Table for Six
Director: Sunny Chan • Writer: Sunny Chan
Starring: Dayo Wong, Stephy Tang, Louis Cheung, Ivana Wong, Lin Min Chen, Peter Chan, Fish Liew
Hong Kong • 1hr 59mins
Opens Hong Kong September 8 • IIA
Grade: B+
So what happens when you have a food-focused Lunar New Year holiday movie by the director who surprised us all with the low-key smart, funny, moving Men on the Dragon ready to go and all the cinemas suddenly shut down on your ass? Well, you spin a little more movie magic, do some quick editing and lay down some fresh ADR and make the aforementioned LNY movie into a Mid-Autumn Festival movie. Easy.
And for the most part, Table for Six | 飯戲攻心 works just fine as a Mid-Autumn movie. The story pivots on a love triangle and a family of brothers wrestling with their parents’ questionable heritage (and property) usually, in true Hong Kong fashion, over the dining table. Rightly so, because if you can find me a family of Hongkongers not fixated on the Grand Holiday Meal I’ve got a lovely oceanfront piece of land for sale in Idaho for you. And the family doesn’t even need to like each other.
Writer-director Sunny Chan Wing-sun’s Table for Six isn’t innovative, or formally clever, or thematically fresh but, like he did in Dragon, Chan manages to mine a boatload of familiar tropes, jokes and emotional revelations and make them fresh, legit funny and, well, emotional. It’s just a little more thoughtful, a little more grown-up. This is Hong Kong holiday cinema punching way above its weight.
No good can come of this
Steve (Dayo Wong Chi-wah, The Grand Grandmaster), Bernard (Louis Cheung Kai-chung, Madalena, Breakout Brothers) and Lung (Peter Chan Charm-man, Three Husbands, Far Far Away) are three brothers living together in the sprawling, ramshackle home they inherited from their parents, charsiu makers. The oldest is Steve, who appears to be a food photographer but is a terrible cook and a romantic disaster. Middle son Bernard stays out of the kitchen, mostly because has a real career and the baby Lung is making a play at becoming an e-sports pro. Steve decides to take it upon himself to prepare the Mid-Autumn dinner for the family, with a little help from Lung’s put-upon girlfriend Josephine (singer-comedian Ivana Wong Yuen-chi, Our Time Will Come), who’s been patiently waiting for the next step in her and Lung’s relationship for 12 years and who happens to be a massive foodie and ace cook. Also coming over for dinner? Bernard’s new squeeze, Monica (Stephy Tang Lai-yan, My Prince Edward) – Steve’s ex. Woops! Naturally, Steve ropes a fangirl (huh?), Meow (Lin Min Chen, One Second Champion), into posing as his new fling, as one does, and dinner goes smashingly.
Of course it doesn’t; the whole thing is a proverbial recipe for disaster because that’s how these kinds of melodrama-comedies work. But never fear. It ends happily enough. Not happily, but realistically happy.
The only slapstick. Truth
Not what it looks like
As a filmmaker, Chan’s strengths are in the reliably nuanced interpersonal dynamics he enjoys picking at, albeit here painted in broad strokes to ensure maximum hyper-comedy. Chan makes room for the sibling tensions, for the realisation that misplaced affections are never going to be reciprocated, fears of missed opportunities, the awkwardness of shared romantic connections and the overwhelming sense of duty with regards to one’s family that gets in the way of a life to breathe as concepts, regardless of how heightened they are in Table for Six; Chan simply uses the various issues as a foundation for the silly story. And it does get silly, but the best silly comedies have a core of emotional, human truth to them, and though Chan isn’t going to set the industry on fire with a brand new visual language, he does wrap his jokes around recognisable characters, if not situations. Except for the dinner table. That’s totally recognisable.
It helps that Chan has a strong cast to help him pull this off. Wong is a seasoned comic actor who’s never gone quite as OTT as Hong Kong films can, but he has a grounded Everyman quality that makes him relatable. Wong (erm, Ivana) and Lin give the traditionally thankless roles of “shrew” and “sex kitten” a surprising amount of depth and resonance. When Meow comes to terms with the fact there’s not a chance in hell for her and Steve it’s this close to heartbreaking. And Cheung has, possibly, the film’s single funniest scene, one that relies on a crazy combination of “leih”, “ma”, “mouh” and “louh.” And the best part of this holiday movie? Not a mooncake in sight. — DEK