Love Lies: Ho Miu-ki’s Unlikely Romantic Drama

Writer Ho Miu-ki is not a fan of social media, and she steers well clear of dating apps. “First, I don’t think my life is really that fascinating,” she says, looking low-key chic in a striped shirt and denim skirt. She’s sitting at the boardroom table in her studio office, a regenerated industrial building in Kowloon that has a long history as office space for local filmmakers and behind-the-scenes techies. It’s the Monday following the release of her debut as a director, Love Lies (我談的那場戀愛) and Ho looks entirely relaxed. “Second, I’d like to reserve my points-of-view to share in my own work, rather than putting it out on social media. Social media is very transient. Once your ideas are out there they’re gone. They’re no longer yours.”

For someone with a standoffish relationship to most social media, Ho’s romantic drama puts a relatively positive spin on those dating apps – albeit with an unconventionally happy ending that comes from the wreckage of a scam. The latest of the Film Development Council’s First Feature Film Initiative (FFFI, from the sixth funding round) topped the box office in each of its first four days of release, and features Sandra Ng Kwun-yu, another local superstar lending her support to an emerging filmmaker, joining Sammi Cheng (Lost Love), Sylvia Chang (A Light Never Goes Out), Anthony Wong (Still Human) and Teresa Mo (Hong Kong Family) among others. Though the fund’s budgets have seen an increase, it’s hard to resist asking Ho: How do you get Ng in your movie with a budget of just HK$8 million?

“You don’t,” she laughs. But Ng was Ho’s first choice the moment she started writing, so pride went out the window. “I was totally shameless. I just kept asking. In fact, we didn’t have much of a budget for the costumes, and I asked if she might be able to supply the characters’ clothes too. We certainly couldn’t supply anything as nice as what [Veronica] would wear – or as nice as anything Sandra probably had.” She guessed right, and Ng was happy to make a donation, as it were, though Ho, her producer and Ng worked out a classic Hollywood points agreement. 

Originally a student of fashion design and merchandising at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Ho pivoted to screenwriting in her last year when a pair of film producers approached her about work as a researcher and creative writer on a film they were developing. The film was 2008’s La Lingerie (which starred Stephy Tang Lai-man, Love Lies’ scam boss) and the producers were Love Lies’ co-writer-producer Chan Hing-ka (who also wrote John Woo’s classic A Better Tomorrow and Stephen Chow’s The Mermaid) and co-producer Janet Chun. She had no experience and didn’t think she could make any substantial contributions. Nonetheless Ho agreed to give it a try. La Lingerie was set for a summertime release, around the same time as the Hong Kong Book Fair, and so Chan and Chun also suggested a novelisation of the screenplay. Ho tried that too. 

“I thought I could always go back to the fashion industry, but that didn’t happen. So [Chan] asked if I’d like to continue in filmmaking,” Ho recalls, adding with a laugh, “Every time I’ve pivoted to a different career path it was because of desperation.”

Ho, who also teaches film directing and screenwriting at Baptist University, went on to carve out a career writing mainstream comedies like Naked Ambition 2, two of the annual Lunar New Year All’s Well Ends Well franchise in 2011 and 2012, and a kids’ film in 2017, Meow. But when the business slowed to a near-halt in the wake of the 2019 protests and the 2020 pandemic, Ho toyed around with writing a film that took her away from her early work – even though she suspected an urban love story would be a challenge to get off the ground. 

“My earlier scripts were exactly the reason I wanted to try this. Something that was a comedy, yes, but with a slower pace and more drama. I think that’s a very hard sell for most producers, but the FFFI was one way to get my vision realised.” Ho wasn’t deterred by a government programme like the FFFI either. Ho sees the first productions as mostly analytical dramas that gave other voices a platform. “Oftentimes the movies that were getting produced were about two guys in a police drama, with a mainland actress for market collaboration. So I didn’t see a path forward and thought the best option was to make my film under this programme.”

The story itself came from a television news segment, familiar to all Hongkongers, in which the police laid out the evidence of a fraud scam the department had just broken up for the media; one of these table displays for the cameras. Ho’s attention was drawn to a pile of paper with the word “script” written across the top page, as well as stacks of supporting materials like business cards and medical records. She finished up by reading a book by a Japanese fraud who chronicled his misdeeds, and chats with friends and family that had scam experiences. 

Despite what the two trailers may suggest, Love Lies is a deliberately paced drama with a touch of romance, about a lonely professional woman who gets exploited by a dating app scam. It’s been four years since her husband passed away when Veronica Yu (Ng) subscribes to a dating app called Matchy, and is quickly matched with a French engineer. He says all the right things and presses all the right buttons, and before long Veronica offers to help him out with an investment gone wrong. Of course, the Frenchman is really the creation of savvy fraudsters led by Joan (Tang) and the directionless twentysomething Joe (up-and-comer Michael Cheung Tin-fu).

“The scammer part of the film reflects a social condition,” says Ho. “It’s something that we’ve all experienced and it’s not something we can escape. It’s a condition of modern society. And so I wanted to focus on the people being scammed, and why they would engage with their scammers. I wanted to investigate that kind of vulnerability. It’s almost a social symptom and the underlying cause is actually people being really lonely.”

In the story, Veronica is a successful doctor in her 50s, with a big house — particularly unusual in Hong Kong — an expensive wine collection and a fat bank account. As a widow, she’s also the ideal target for Joan and Joe. For Ho, writing a middle-aged woman was a welcome challenge, but more than that, the character was emblematic of many of Love Lies’ broader themes. “Sandra and Michael’s characters are opposites. There are huge distances between them in terms of social and economic class, education, background and age. Love is a mental feeling, and like loneliness it’s something that transcends all kinds of differences.” The scam itself is a device Ho and Chan use to gently probe how we regularly create and accept online identities, digital authenticity, and the nature of love and romance. If Veronica decides her relationship with the Frenchman was real, was it – and are the feelings it stirred in her less valid if it’s not?

Love Lies is a sure-handed debut with plenty to say about emotion and self-fulfillment without tipping over into maudlin. Which is not to say sure-handed came easily. “I had literally no confidence going into this,” Ho admits with a chuckle. Noting she didn’t come from a film school background and doesn’t even make videos on her phone, she chalks up her film knowledge to years hanging out on sets as a writer, and really listening when directors were asking her to translate their visions into script pages. “I came to understand the aesthetic reasoning behind their requests. But I’m very thankful that my crew and my producers were doing this with me.”

Technology is set to inform Ho’s next film too, which will see her return to pure scriptwriting and to the world of social media – but for digital natives. “Millennials grew up with social media as a norm, so they’re used to sharing every part of their lives [online],” she says, only slightly baffled. “They’ve never known anything else and I’m keen to explore how a fundamental lack of privacy, and the expectation of it, affects their love lives and their sex lives.”

Until then, Ho is keeping her fingers crossed that word-of-mouth will give Love Lies legs enough to get Ng a decent paycheque and keep theatres operating for her next film, something she worries about. After quoting some dire numbers (Beetlejuice Beetlejuice only sold four tickets on one day at a surveyed cinema) and wondering aloud how Hong Kong’s 80-odd cinemas can survive them, she answers her own question about the future of theatrical releases. 

“Some films need to be experienced in an immersive theatre. Sure, with Marvel people want bang for the buck, but something like a romance you want to experience in a dark environment and just concentrate on experiencing the story,” she concludes. “Watching collectively where everybody’s laughing or crying is very different from sitting at home.” Spoken like a veteran filmmaker.

All stills and trailer are courtesy of One Cool Pictures

Love Lies is now showing in Hong Kong