This article is part of a guide to Hong Kong from FT Globetrotter
Paris has romance and New York has the skyline. Hong Kong has heartache, mystery — and Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and a wealth of stylised, site-specific, vastly influential action and crime movies. Film-industry history and real life both played a role in that. A longtime liking for martial arts crowd-pleasers among the city’s producers was turbocharged by Lee — until, in the 1980s, spikes in the crime rate inspired local film-makers to make underworld thrillers that outdid Hollywood.
But there have always been other movie Hong Kongs too. Take the swooning, colour-soaked love stories made by director Wong Kar Wai, raised in the city by parents exiled from Shanghai by the Cultural Revolution. His films find their characters pulled this way and that, in keeping with a place whose past has been bound up with both Britain and mainland China, and whose movies have always been a back-and-forth dialogue with America.
In the Mood for Love (2000)
Where to watch: available to stream on Amazon Prime and, in the US and Canada, The Criterion Channel
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Before the violence, a romance — of sorts. One of the finest in modern cinema, in fact. Wong Kar Wai picked up the thread of this long, lovely ache of melancholy from characters featured in his earlier Hong Kong fable, Days of Being Wild. Now, amid mah-jong tables and noodle stalls in a sweltering 1962, a journalist and secretary realise their spouses are having an affair and are drawn together by mutual heartbreak. The casting of Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung — each born in Hong Kong — was a triumph of chemistry. And yet the film has a secret. By the time it was made in 2000, the Hong Kong it portrayed (and beautifully evoked) had changed so utterly that Wong filmed most of the exteriors in Bangkok. Movies — like so much — are rarely what they seem.
Police Story (1985)
Where to watch: Amazon Prime and The Criterion Channel (US and Canada)
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Maggie Cheung also starred in Police Story, a very different Hong Kong landmark — the grand showcase for the gleeful talents of action star Jackie Chan. His brand of gymnastic mayhem owes more to Buster Keaton than Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the movie is a string of doolally stunts involving double-decker buses and endless shattered glass that were both a product of the local film industry and a physical snapshot of Hong Kong too. We open among the hillside shantytowns that dotted the 1980s island — and end with a manic, spectacular finale in the Wing On Plaza in Kowloon’s Tsim Sha Tsui district.
Enter the Dragon (1973)
Where to watch: Amazon Prime, iTunes, YouTube and other platforms
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The last screen appearance of a Hong Kong superstar, Bruce Lee. His final film before his tragic early death at 32, Enter the Dragon has been a vast influence on everything from action blockbusters to anime — a heady blend of martial-arts choreography, spy movie and underworld thriller, built around its star’s outsize charisma. Important in this context too, it exists as a panorama of the city and Hong Kong island, from the skyline of the credits onwards. (The interiors were shot in a vanished jewel of Hong Kong history, the Goldest Harvest studios in Kowloon, once a backlot big enough to rival Hollywood.)
Chungking Express (1994)
Where to watch: BluRay and DVD and The Criterion Channel (US and Canada)
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Crime and passion were both in play in Wong Kar Wai’s lush portrait of two Hong Kong police officers each made lovesick by break-ups. The film also drew on the personal compass points of its director. Half the film is tied up with Chungking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui, the multipurpose complex close to where Wong grew up, whose louche clubs were once staples of Hong Kong nightlife. The other half is named after a modest Central food stall called Midnight Express, close to the apartment where Wong’s second cop lives, and where a mesmeric sequence stars the Central-Mid Levels Escalator, only opened the year before the film came out in 1994. (The flat was actually the home of Wong’s longtime cinematographer Christopher Doyle; for the duration of the shoot, he had to sleep on the floor.)
City on Fire (1987)
Where to watch: BluRay and DVD
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You may find yourself watching the Hong Kong of City of Fire and thinking of LA. That would be due to the widely noted resemblance between director Ringo Lam’s kinetic crime drama and Reservoir Dogs, the debut of Quentin Tarantino, which often seems — let us say — like a fond homage to the Hong Kong film. But Lam’s movie wasn’t just a tale of an undercover cop among brutal robbers in the chaotic, neon Kowloon of the 1980s. It also sprang from reality — the trigger for the story (which inspired Tarantino in turn) was a news report of an escape from the police by local jewel thieves.
The House of 72 Tenants (1973)
Where to watch: DVD
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Some schools of Hong Kong cinema have been eagerly embraced in the west. Others have enjoyed huge popularity in Hong Kong itself while leaving outsiders perplexed. Take The House of 72 Tenants — a boisterous, big-hearted comedy set in a decrepit tenement that broke box office records when it was released in 1973. As in all things, local tastes do not always tally with those of the international market.
A Better Tomorrow (1986)
Where to watch: DVD
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Director John Woo attracted so many admirers for his hyper-stylish action thrillers — “ballets of bullets” was the term — it felt inevitable that he would leave for Hollywood. That journey began with A Better Tomorrow, a top-tier gangster movie that made expert use of Hong Kong as a location of many moods, playing out in scuffed industrial spaces in To Kwa Wan and high-rise streets in Central. Leading man Chow Yun-Fat’s uniform of sunglasses and trenchcoat even became a fashion craze among the youth of Hong Kong when the movie came out in 1986.
Rouge (1987)
Where to watch: DVD
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Before Wong Kar Wai gave the world Chungking Express, director Stanley Kwan made an opulent story of Hong Kong across two eras, with two sets of lovers and two very different visions of the city. Here — working from the novel by Lilian Lee — the timeframes were the 1930s and 1987. The first was witness to a doomed romance between a courtesan and playboy in a world of teahouses and opium dens. The second was touched by a supernatural echo from half a century before, a ghost story played out in a city where the past is rarely ready to be forgotten.
Infernal Affairs (2002)
Where to watch: BluRay and DVD
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To close, a movie that seems to capture so much about Hong Kong movies: a brilliantly tangled crime story with an operatic undertow, impossible to picture made anywhere else but universal enough for global audiences. (It ended up remade as The Departed by no less than Martin Scorsese, whose version wasn’t as good as the original, even if it did win an Oscar.) Amid the intrigue, Hong Kong itself made a crucial supporting player on both sides of Kowloon Bay, with a headline role for the rooftop of the North Point Government Office — high above the endless drama of the streets below.
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