Hong Kong’s Latest Category III Film Isn’t What You’d Expect

Tam Wai-ching comes racing around the corner of a corridor in one of the Kwai Chung industrial buildings that have lately become home to all sorts of creative spaces: art galleries, design and music studios, production offices. It’s the day after the local gala premiere of Tam’s second feature film, Someone Like Me (像我這樣的愛情), and she looks spry and energetic despite the late night and the demands of her first child, now six months old. After apologising profusely for being late — it’s a marginal and understandable 10 minutes — and proudly showing off her wall of staghorn ferns, she gets down to business.

Which is not to suggest Tam is detached or focused to a fault. Dressed in oversized black sweats that dwarf her small frame, she always seems to be two steps ahead in the conversation. Time is precious; she’s not about to waste it being unnerved by any particular questions, and she has an uncanny ability to cast a critical eye at herself. It may be something she learnt from her instructor at the City University School of Creative Media, director Patrick Tam Kar-ming (Nomad), or her personal mentor and filmmaking idol, renowned production designer, editor and Wong Kar-wai right hand William Chang Suk-ping (Stanley Kwan Kam-ping’s Lan Yu).

“After working on two or three mainstream productions, I really wanted to get out of that area,” she says of her earliest days in cinema. “Unfortunately, in 2016, I won a grant from the First Feature Film Initiative — and I say unfortunately because I was totally unprepared for it. I thought it would be like making my student film. I found myself totally out of my depth, unprepared to deal with actors and the whole production team, and you have to earn that trust as a director. My mindset was too immature.”

That first film was the thorny student-teacher romance In Your Dreams (2017), starring and produced by Carina Lau Kar-ling, in which Tam struggled to strike a satisfying balance between art house and mainstream filmmaking. Recalling “intense anxiety” during the production, conviction that “every single decision I made was wrong,” and an eye towards “just getting it finished,” Tam still looks back at the film as a missed opportunity on multiple levels. “Having Carina on board was a good thing, but in the end she was wasted. If I were Carina I would have said no,” she adds with a sardonic laugh. Contrary to what Tam may believe, however, In Your Dreams did demonstrate her potential as a filmmaker, and it was the exercise she needed to get herself on the right artistic track.

“After finishing it I spent a few years kind of soul searching, thinking about what kind of director I wanted to be,” she says. “After I finished this movie, I feel as though I’ve found the answer to that.” Tam admits she didn’t have the right level or sensitivity or empathy for the characters, which were based on a story a high school friend confided to her, and looking back she chides herself for being too rigidly traditional to handle the material, personally and formally. “I was a little too judgemental.”

From books to film

Tam’s first career was actually as an author. Starting in 2005, she published a string of novels under the pen name of Lam Tin, among them The Lamplighter in the Dark, Sea, and Blooming to Decadence. She was still in her first round of university studies when she grew frustrated by Hong Kong’s lack of a book culture. Like any artist she wanted her work to be seen, and so she developed an interest in what she considered a more powerful, more accessible medium: cinema. That was when she enrolled in City U, and when Patrick Tam instilled an appreciation of film as an art form in her. “I grew up on a farm in Guangdong,” she says. “Before I moved to Hong Kong, when I was 18, I had never really gone to a cinema to watch a movie.”

Modest success came when she finished The Lost Together, her first short in 2009, and then 14th and The Little One (both 2012), the latter of which was the Fresh Wave winner. That landed her work writing on several commercial films, such as Benny Chan’s The White Storm (2013) and Dante Lam’s Operation Mekong (2016) and the realisation it wasn’t quite what she was looking for.

“The way the industry treats writers is unreasonable,” says Tam, echoing nearly every writer in the world. “It’s actually a little bit insulting, because during production, [directors, producers, actors] can change the script on the spot, without my consent.” That lack of control was part of the reason she jumped feet first into In Your Dreams, and later nine episodes of ViuTV’s 2019 series The Republic, a kind of Hong Kong Black Mirror. 

It was Chang’s comments, however, that stuck with her during her hiatus. “He was my editor on that film and he said, ‘If you don’t have the time and talent to commit you shouldn’t be directing.’ That lit a spark in me. I spent a lot of time examining why Dreams wasn’t the film I wanted it to be, but it was failure that gave rise to this movie. Without that, I wouldn’t have gained any insight into the process. And I wanted to prove something to William. He’s the perfect collaborator. I love him even when he’s harsh.”

Unmet needs

Shot in just 18 days, produced by Kwan and once again edited with Chang, Someone Like Me has its genesis in a casual conversation with a friend of a friend, about a Taiwanese volunteer organisation that provided a wide range of services to people with physical disabilities, including sexual services. Initially she wasn’t interested, but the more she listened the more the older, wiser Tam was drawn to the often infuriating tragedy she was hearing about.

“He told me so many stories that got me ugly crying,” she says. “One was about giving a client a shower, a woman, who asked him to show her where her vagina was.” Tam pauses, still baffled. “We’re not talking about a kid. I’m talking about a 40-year-old woman. That really showed me how the physical needs of people with disabilities are totally ignored.” 

Comparisons to Oasis by Lee Chang-dong and The Sessions by Ben Lewin, other films about people living with cerebral palsy who demand their sexual needs be acknowledged, will be frequent. But Someone Like Me has its own singular voice. The film stars Fish Liew Chi-yu (Pavane for an Infant, Table for Six) as Mui, an independent young woman and a popular artist living with cerebral palsy. Mui is intensely average, with a close-knit group of friends and a very real, average sex drive. But she’s at a stage in life where her mother (Alice Lau Nga-lai), not her, has decided she needs to have a hysterectomy in order to avoid the inconvenience of menstruation. Before she undergoes the surgery, Mui goes to a broker that offers intimate services for the disabled and meets Ken, played by Carlos Chan Ka-lok (Anselm Chan’s Ready O/R Rot, The Goldfinger). Though Ken has his own emotional baggage and debt problems, Mui forms an attachment to him that, rather than being purely romantic, is about self-determination and her right to do with her body what she pleases.

Told purely from Mui’s point of view and centring her desires, pleasure and experiences, Tam and Liew’s exhaustive research within the cerebral palsy community — how people handle everyday tasks and how they talk — paid off with a respectful lead performance and the kind of empathetic portrait Tam thinks she’s grown into drawing. But she got lucky, too. After countless rejections from other actors, mostly because they thought they’d look foolish in the role, fast-rising star Liew was “the only one brave enough to take the part” and thread the needle in a tricky performance; both discovered the fine line in separating verbal and non-verbal cerebral palsy. Early on Tam worried about a lack of rapport with her lead, but as the days ticked by, they clicked; Tam now calls Liew a genius, so much so that after finishing the first edit Chang’s only comment was: “This shouldn’t have worked, but it did.”

Prudish reception

Someone Like Me’s uncompromising perspective earned it a Category III rating despite its empowering themes and subtle intimacies. Critics have long argued that female pleasure has historically been unfairly subjected to stronger ratings than brutal violence, not just here but elsewhere, too. Tam explains it was two seconds of Chan’s moving bare behind — “You can see it, and he’s gyrating” — that got her film the most restrictive rating in Hong Kong. The censors were happy to grant a more accessible IIB if she removed the offending two seconds. She declined.

“I wanted to leave them in. That’s the whole point,” she says with a sigh. “No matter how advanced Hong Kong thinks it is, it’s actually one of the most conservative places in Asia, and a bit backward.”

The film had its world premiere in Tokyo at the end of October, followed by a screening at the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival earlier in November. By all accounts, viewers are responding positively. “I know very well that this is not a movie for everyone. It’s not commercial,” Tam says with a shrug. “I just got a text from Carlos, and he said none of his friends really understood it. That doesn’t bother me in the least.” 

She expects she’ll be accused of exploitation, and questioned about whether she has the right to tell Mui’s story. She knows she’ll be held up against other socially-minded filmmakers like Ann Hui and that she’s not at that level — yet. But Someone Like Me’ s ambiguous, almost triumphant ending is elegant for its brevity, thanks to Tam’s respect not just for her audience, but for Mui.

“It’s wishful thinking to want my audience to see something specific,” she says. “People see what they want to see, and if they think something is complete garbage, then it’s garbage. If they see a classic it’s a classic. But it’s the reason I left the ending of the film the way it is. As a creative I don’t think I have the right to determine the future of that character. All women should be able to determine their own futures, so I left Mui’s up to the audience.”

Someone Like Me opens in cinemas November 27.