The Last Dance Explores Family, Faith and the Limits of Taoism

Whether or not one considers themself a follower of Taoist tenets, most anyone who lives in Hong Kong has encountered its most common funeral rite: breaking the gates of hell. In Taoism, the belief is that the dead face judgement in hell. During this judgement, a priest rushes into the ceremony with a fiery sword, breaks the gate holding the dead there and frees the soul for reincarnation. Breaking hell’s gates is a uniquely Hong Kong ritual and its performance by a male priest — never a woman — is the root from which writer-director Anselm Chan Mou-yin’s The Last Dance (破。地獄) grows.

Chan is in his mid-40s, but you can almost count the grey hairs — about 12 — scattered on his head. He’s remarkably relaxed, examining an analogue LomoApparat camera as he waits for the signal that it’s time to dive into discussing his third feature film. And Chan likes to chat; he goes on reflective tangents about his personal growth and respectfully listens to outside opinions about points in his films. His words are measured but he’s not cagey. He doesn’t have another job to go to when he’s not directing a film, considering himself a full-time writer, always observing or researching the world around him. Like many directors working right now, he learnt filmmaking on the job, working for producer-director Wong Jing starting in 2002 and learning from legendary writers Lau Tin-chi (who started his career way back in 1974 with Games Gamblers Play) and TVB writer Ma Yan-chi.

“I don’t come from an academic background,” says Chan. “My first job was as a TV racing commentator, and also writing for a horse racing magazine, you know those little publications that help you place a bet. Wong Jing, the director, owned one and he picked up on my writing and asked if I’d be interested in writing scripts. I said sure. And Lau, who is considered a pioneer of Hong Kong script writing, said I had potential. Later on, I found out he basically told everybody that they had potential,” he laughs.

Chan got schooled, so to speak, by Wong, Lau and then Ma, and then by working in television and slowly segueing into films. Along the way he learned about the rest of the trade by picking up assignments as an assistant director and producing making-of shorts. In 2005, he joined Wong at his production company to write for what would become the massively popular ATV series Central Affairs. It was typical of Hong Kong production work, where everyone does everything, and Chan was dealing directly with the actors and directors, and working with them on stories when there was no script. 

In 2008, he took a brief detour to China, eventually writing iQIYI’s The Lost Swordship and Anhui Broadcasting’s The Scholars, but it was a meeting with Vincent Kok Tak-chiu that sealed his fate. Chan wrote or co-wrote many of Kok’s best known comedies, including Love Is… Pyjamas (2012), the 2014 Lunar New Year hit Hello Babies, House of Wolves (2016) and Two Wrongs Make a Right (2017), and developed a sense for broad appeal filmmaking. He came to appreciate local director Peter Chan Ho-sun (He’s a Woman, She’s a Man, Wu Xia) and especially Steven Spielberg. “His work reaches a lot of people. He’s very accessible. And we share a zodiac sign,” he quips. By the time he made his first film, Ready O/R Knot in 2021, he was not only a seasoned film and television writer, he was a published author; his 2013 suspense novel Anchor is on its way to an English translation, and Chan hopes to adapt it for the screen.

His breakout rom-coms Ready O/R Knot and its 2023 sequel Ready O/R Rot are as distinct from each other as Rot is from Last Dance, which is easily his most assured film to date. Taking a cue from Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, and maybe a little of Pang Ho-cheung’s Puff/Buff/Cuff series, Chan chalks up the increasingly maturity in his work to he himself getting older and wiser, and learning how to say something substantial in the most relatable ways possible. 

Knot brought together a half-dozen of Hong Kong’s fastest emerging actors — Michelle Wai Sze-na, Carlos Chan Ka-lok, Hedwig Tam Sin-yin, Chu Pak-hong, Kaki Sham Ka-ki and Renci Yeung Si-wing — but saddled them with retrograde gender tropes that buried any insights into modern relationships. The film was a hit, even though Chan looks at it now as the work of a novice. “I didn’t feel confident enough to skew towards a character study, and I felt the cute comedy elements needed to be more pronounced,” he says. “Rot is more representative of my own personal values but Hong Kong was at a low point in 2021 socially, and I think audiences needed a laugh.” 

That may be so, but Chan put his progressive values front and centre for the second film, and turned out an insightful, sharply observant, superior romantic dramedy that delved into thorny family dynamics and the work demanded of an adult relationship. Rot demonstrated a huge artistic leap, which Chan naturally took again with his third film as he got older. He describes The Last Dance as an examination of the meaning of life — one of art’s narrowest topics — and the dual tracks we all run on. On one side we’re accumulating memories and experiences, on the other we’re counting down to death the minute we’re born. “It came to me at a low point in my life.”

The film stars former comedy giant Dayo Wong Chi-wah as Dominic, a wedding planner failing due to the pandemic who gets a new lease on life when a friend passes his stake in a funeral service business to him. His new associate is Master Man (Michael Hui Koon-man, Where the Wind Blows) a rigidly traditional Taoist priest who disapproves of Dominic’s methods, which treat the funeral event as if it were a for-profit wedding function, offering potential clients two-for-one promotions, trinkets and finding ways to market on social media. To add insult to injury, Dominic isn’t particularly faithful to anything, and didn’t believe in the product he previously sold. He and his girlfriend Jade (Catherine Chau) have lived together for years with no plans for marriage, mostly due to Dominic’s cynicism, a direct result of his time in the wedding industry. 

The origins for the film date back to 2022, at the height of Hong Kong’s worst Covid wave, on the day Chan started shooting Rot. He got a message that his grandmother had passed away after several days in hospital. No one was allowed hospital visits at the time, and those lost moments with his grandmother had a significant impact on Chan. “I considered myself quite close to my grandmother – through good and bad, love, disagreements, all of it,” he says. “I wondered why I was so affected and wanted to explore that. I wanted to add that element to Rot, to look at life and death, but I wasn’t ready, and that film wasn’t the time to do it.”

Chan and co-writer Cheng Wai-kei (who he worked with on Hello Babies and Knot) found the space to explore themes of life, death, faith, acceptance and breaking personal chains in The Last Dance, getting an assist from the film’s star, Dayo Wong, who majored in philosophy in university. Wong got involved when the film was still just an idea, piquing up to the subject matter and joining Chan in the research process. Chan gushes a bit when talking about Wong’s invaluable input and how he provided the philosophical spark that helped shape the final script. “Okay, Dayo is amazing – even more amazing than I imagined he was,” he says.

The clash between Dominic and Man is just the narrative entry point for the film’s larger themes, which pivot heavily on the way Man’s daughter, Yuet (Michelle Wai, 77 Heartbreaks), and son Ben (Chu Pak-hong, My Prince Edward) approach Taoism and their father’s devotion to it. Yuet, a paramedic with a messy romantic life, adores her father but has no time for Taoism – which similarly has no time for her as an “unclean” woman who menstruates. Ben is only half-heartedly following his father into the priesthood, and he’s quick to prioritise his Christian wife and young son’s school needs. As if shedding another light on the issues, we witness Dominic’s emotional growth as a service provider manifests in his interactions with grieving clients: he accepts a request from a young mother (Rosa Maria Velasco, Everyphone Everywhere) who’s lost her son that no other funeral providers will even talk to, and breaks a few rules so a powerless woman (Rachel Leung Yung-ting, In Broad Daylight) can get some closure with her sister (or perhaps partner; it’s intentionally ambiguous).

“From a Taoist perspective, the funeral is a means of transcendence – for the person who departed to go to the afterlife, but it’s also the final interaction between the departed and the living, and the last act of saying goodbye,” says Chan. “The [Chinese] title means ‘break the gate of hell’ but in Hong Kong in particular, it’s more of a pagan tradition rooted in thousands of years of Chinese culture.” 

As a Buddhist taught to value equality among all living things, Chan was perplexed by this willing submission by proponents, as well as the persistent segregation of women and their designation as unclean within Taoism. Citing the passing of his girlfriend’s mother and the subsequent restrictions on what she could and couldn’t touch or do, Chan decided the time was right to challenge what he felt were outdated beliefs. “My girlfriend is a woman, the person who passed away was a woman, and most of the family members were women. And they were being repeatedly insulted by this process.” 

Ultimately the film became a thought-provoking meditation on the way we all live behind locked gates and how we break those gates. The concept moved the packed audience at the film’s Hong Kong Asian Film Festival premier to tears – audibly so. “I honestly don’t know why that was the reaction,” Chan shrugs, truly baffled. “Believe me. That was not intentional.”

All Stills are courtesy of Emperor Motion Pictures Ltd

The Last Dance is in cinemas now.