Ready for a Close-up
Anselm Chan steps up his game for his most mature and assured film to date. Who knew ‘REady o/r Knot’ would lead to this?
The Last Dance
Director: Anselm Chan • Writers: Anselm Chan, Cheng Wai-kei
Starring: Dayo Wong, Michael Hui, Michelle Wai, Chu Pak-hong, Catherine Chau
Hong Kong • 2hrs 6mins
Opens Hong Kong Nov 9 • IIB
Grade: B
Cast your mind back. Back to 2020 when a vast number of people in Hong Kong were scrambling to make ends meet as businesses collapsed and we all had to literally step away from each other, even under the most intimate of circumstances – like lonely hospital stays and funerals. Which were both on the rise thanks to COVID. That’s the space co-writer and director Anselm Chan Mou-yin drops us into in his third film, The Last Dance | 破．地獄, a family drama exploring the boundaries of faith, life, death and letting go. Chan cut his writing teeth for jiggle master Wong Jing, and made a splash, ironically, in 2021 with rom-com Ready O/R Knot and its more dramatic companion piece two years later, Ready O/R Rot. Knot was a fairly rote Hong Kong rom-com, one that predictably traded in retrograde gender archetypes that were insulting to its emerging cast – chiefly Michelle Wai Sze-na, Carlos Chan Ka-lok, Hedwig Tam Sin-yin, Chu Pak-hong and Kaki Sham Ka-ki. The guys were dawgs, the girls were shrews, everyone played mind games… It was all very 1960s, but it was modest hit. As was the superior sequel Rot, which took a minute to actually explore the stress of familial friction, the unpredictability of life and what an adult relationship actually entails.
So it’s good to see Chan has taken another step forward – emotionally and artistically – with The Last Dance, sort of the logical next step after Knot and Rot (though not a third in a trilogy, which will indeed happen one day), diving headlong into the world of olds struggling to push beyond their lot in life, even as that life goes to shit. It’s not a tearjerker by any stretch of the imagination; in fact it’s quite empowering on some levels. But audiences at the HKAFF premier were in tears. Bring tissues.
A Master and hopeless apprentice
It’s 2020 and COVID is raging. Wedding planner Dominic (Dayo Wong Chi-wah, Table for Six, A Guilty Conscience) is watching as his business goes down the drain. He’s gets lucky when a funeral planner he knows – ’til death do we part and all that – retires and hands Dominic his stake in his funeral business. Figuring weddings and funerals are same same on the sales front, just different on the execution front he dives in, confident he can make a go of his new career. Trouble is, his inherited partner, Master Man (Michael Hui Koon-man, Where the Wind Blows) is an old school Daoist priest who takes the work of seeing people to the other side and breaking the gates of hell very, very seriously. It takes all of five minutes for their worldviews to clash, and for Dominic’s less than pious attitude to insult Man.
While the two try to make the business work, Man has to deal with his fractious family. His daughter Yuet (Michelle Wai Sze-na, Customs Frontline) is a paramedic who respects her father despite never getting any from him in return. In Daoism, women are filthy, unworthy creatures and Man holds that line firmly. His son who’s following in his footsteps, Ben (Chu Pak-hong, Chan’s Ready films, My Prince Edward), checks the boxes but is more focused on his Christian (clutches pearls) wife and son, and when it comes to Daoist rites is just going through the motions. Dominic has a frustrated partner in Jade (Catherine Chau Ka-yee, The Goldfinger) who tolerates his deep-seated aversion to marriage despite his vocation. They’ve been together for years. It’s good enough.
The Last Dance is a hard nut to crack in some ways. It’s got stellar below the line work by DOP Anthony Pun Yiu-ming (Cesium Fallout, Anita), and ace editors Curran Pang Ching-hay (Infernal Affairs, Chilli Laugh Story) and the legendary William Chang Suk-ping, and a string of some of the industry’s best working actors (many in Chan’s stable of regulars) in small, critical roles: Rosa Maria Velasco, Rachel Leung Yung-ting, Paul Chu Pui, Elaine Jin Yan-ling, Vincent Kok Tak-chiu and Michael Ning. The headlining cast goes without saying, with Wong managing a balance between Wong-ish irreverence and gravity. Wai is back in the promising form she was in Rot, after Customs made her a houseplant, and Chu is a “Duh.” But the film can also be distancing with its focus on faith. Dance is hardly a religious screed – it’s not Angel Studios up in here – but if ideas of hell, judgement and the afterlife is a squick, then this could be a problem.
That said, it’s clearly a problem for Chan and his regular collaborator Cheng Wai-kei too, because the family drama is rooted in how each engages with faith. Man butts head with Yuet over his rigid adherence to Daoist dogma, for lack of a better term, and with Ben for his casual attitude towards it. The film’s title in Chinese literally translates to something along the lines of “break hell”, and for most of The Last Dance, Dominic, Yuet and Ben are putting most of their energy into just that: breaking out of personal hells. The same can be said of Dominic’s clients, each of whom is trapped in a kind of purgatory. Velasco and Leung turn up in small, vivid roles as women trying to grieve a son and a sister (perhaps partner, it’s unclear), who are prevented from doing so by choice, circumstance, law, perception or any combination thereof. Of course, Man has his cage, as does Dominic, and we spend most of the time with these people in their struggle for redemption, vindication or catharsis. I’ll be honest: on first blush The Last Dance is hardly groundbreaking, and a bit of a slog. But scratch the surface and there’s more to it than meets the eye – for Daoists, Catholics, Muslims, Hindus, Jews and anyone else with a difficult family or stuck in a difficult situation.