Leaving in Sorrow (You You Chou Chou De Zoule)

(China/Hong Kong 2001, VHS, 90 min.)

Director: Vincent Chui
Cast: Tony Ho, Duncan Lai, Shawn Yu, Crystal Lui, Ivy Ho, Sheng Ming Fai

Leaving in Sorrow is the first Hong Kong film to deal with the moral fall-out in the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis. It focus upon a group of thirty-something entangled in one way or another in a money mad society -- the city of Hong Kong. The story begins with a December day in 1996. For most Hong Kong people, that was just another ordinary day. Among them is Ray, who resides in San Francisco after graduating from College; Alex, a pastor whose church is sought after by property developers; and Chris, a journalist who still bears the scars of the June 4 massacre. The financial Crisis proves to be turning points in these characters' lives in ways they could not have imaged.

Critic's Corner

"The film is an urban drama filmed in digital video (following Evans Chan's Map of Sex and Love, the first HK digital feature). ....... A project like this might have become an overly schematic, political mapping of the typical underpinnings of an upwardly mobile class of HKers' traumas and complexes. But Chui simultaneously complicates and lightens the film with a nervously fractured style. The skittering, quick-cutting, constantly reframing cameras (Chui used two during filming) can be a bit wearying, but it's not merely a stylistic affectation. Chui makes it integral to the film: a jumpy sense of space, an unstable set of points of view, scenes constructed out of brief takes shuffled together to leave tiny gaps, elisions, small jumps in space and time, a constant uneasy disequilibrium that can never quite settle down (with one notable exception). These techniques successfully evoke the fractured incoherencies inherent in the particular time and place - 1997 Hong Kong - that the film's characters float in.

Chui's film neatly elides the precise moment of the handover, the anchor-point of Hong Kong Time: the action disconcertingly jumps from the last huge June 4 commemoration in Hong Kong a month before the handover to a year or more afterwards, when Hong Kongers are forced to deal with the effects of the post-1997 Asian economic slump. The film affords its characters no grounding, no stable fulcrum around which history pivoted (July 1), but takes them directly from pre- to post-return disequilibrium. But Leaving Sorrowfully largely keeps its own balance, aligning style, structure, mood, and setting to fine expressive effect."
- Shelly Kracier's review for Reel Asian Film Festival