Papa, A Hong Kong Crime Movie, But Not the One You Expect

Philip Yung Chi-kwong’s industrial office in To Kwa Wan is notable for the cluttered rhythms and organised chaos of an arts space. Visitors are greeted by rack upon rack of costumes and props crammed into a gallery shared with another arts group. Writers sit tapping away on keyboards in breakout rooms. At present, Yung and his assistants are looking for two of the office’s four resident felines, and eventually Siu Fa and Dak Lei prance into Yung’s personal office. That raises the first key question of the day: is Yung a crazy cat lady?

“Oh yeah, sure,” he declares proudly, finally taking a seat after the buzz dies down. The filmmaker is dressed for work, decked out in comfortable loose cotton pants and a t-shirt, though his hair looks freshly cut. He seems to be talking to five people all at once, but strangely he always seems to be paying attention to everyone. He’s a self-professed “go with the flow” kind of guy, but he can drop the kidding — which is frequent — and get serious on a dime.

Yung’s latest film is Papa (爸爸), arguably his best to date and in line with his emerging voice as one of Hong Kong’s great observers of the city’s underbelly. Though his major break-out didn’t come until the stylish 2015 thriller Port of Call — about the brutal murder of a teenaged sex worker — Yung has bathed all his work in a downbeat wash that throws the more fragile aspects of human nature into sharp relief. It’s an image Yung himself pushes back on, suggesting he fell into exploring our collective fragility and darkness almost by accident, after absorbing what would become major influences.

“As I was reading reports about the crime [for Port of Call] I became fascinated by the visual looks of the victim and the perpetrator, and that’s what started that particular project,” he reasons. “And I was also into detective novels by [Japanese mystery writer] Seicho Matsumoto, so that’s why I may have headed in that direction. It’s definitely not intentional – it’s more intuitive.” 

Matsumoto has been credited with popularising detective novels in Japan as well as being among the first writers to psychologise his characters. Yung’s interest in Matsumoto dovetailed with an appreciation for literature that critiques social conditions. Early in his career he wrote for RTHK, whose mandate is to examine social issues, which are oftentimes more focused on the darker side of the society. Ann Hui was one of his earliest supporters. “She may have been an influence too, especially given her early films,” says Yung. In the early 1980s, Hui emerged as one of the Hong Kong New Wave’s most socially-minded filmmakers, tackling topics such as displacement, refugee life and activism, in films such as Song of the Exile, Boat People and Ordinary Heroes.

Yung took a circuitous route to getting noticed by Hui. While studying and sitting for the old A level exams in 1998, a social worker referred him for a job on a film set where he worked as a production assistant and a script supervisor. “I was planning to go to Baptist University for communications, but everyone on set kept telling me that none of them went to film school,” he says. “They told me to keep working in different positions and learn that way.” 

For the most part, he did, the exception being a single scriptwriting course offered by the Hong Kong Film Directors Guild. Aside from PA work Yung, now 43, got hands-on experience as a line producer and in the foley or sound effects department on a handful of martial arts and action films. “Guns cocking are usually door locks or handles flipping,” he says with a laugh. “Wind and moving trees are usually tearing [a sheet of] newspaper.” But as a director, he cites Hou Hsiao-hsien’s landmark post-war White Terror drama A City of Sadness and Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as foundational filmmaking texts.

“I wasn’t familiar with that particular period in Taiwan’s history, so the movie inspired me to study more of it, and I was quite taken by the art direction,” he says. “And there’s a scene in Cuckoo where [Will Sampson’s] Chief Bromden rips the fountain off the wall that moved me to tears. Before that I didn’t realise movies could impact people that way. I didn’t understand why, so I wanted to figure it out.”

After learning the ropes as production crew and cutting his writer’s teeth as a staff scribe for television and RTHK, Yung was commissioned to make a film about young Hongkongers afflicted with ennui hanging out in Shenzhen. The film failed to secure funding and was effectively shelved – until Hui stepped up and encouraged Yung to finish it himself. He told her he was in no position to make it and had no money to put towards a budget. “And she said, ‘Oh, I don’t think you need a lot of money for this,’” he chuckles again. 

The result was Yung’s 2009 debut, Glamorous Youth, a languid, stylised character study of disaffected youth in the decade after the handover. The naturalism and gritty images that would become Yung’s hallmarks are already peeking through. May We Chat followed in 2014, a visual experiment that married Technicolor excess with dark drama about three teenage girls lured into Hong Kong’s dodgy underworld. Scripts for Juno Mak’s revisionist vampire thriller Rigor Mortis and Derek Kwok’s firefighter thriller As the Light Goes Out came in 2013 and 2014, and then the worldwide success of Port of Call – the film that earned him the director’s chair on his biggest and most troubled film, 2022’s Where the Wind Blows.

The sprawling crime drama about a pair of notoriously corrupt cops in the 1950s, 60s and 70s aimed to be an epic about right, wrong, power and the city’s growing pains. It featured an all-star cast led by Aaron Kwok and Tony Leung. Though finished in 2018, its release was cancelled when it failed to pass muster with China’s censors — it was a China/Hong Kong co-production — and again at the last minute when the screening at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2021 ran into “technical difficulties,” which many in the industry say is code for censorship. It eventually opened HKIFF the next year. 

There has been no official reason given for the delays, and the film was a financial failure, but it was nonetheless an ambitious work that took a lot of formal risks; there’s a musical production number in it. Yung has never spoken about the film on the record at length, but he will say, “I didn’t work on it as if it were a commercial project. I approached it the way I do smaller budget films. The producers asked me to make a true crime film in the vein of Port of Call but on a bigger scale, and I was always interested in making a film about old Hong Kong. I thought this might be my chance. In retrospect maybe I wouldn’t make the same choices.”

Critics have already started referring to Papa as a return to form or a comeback of sorts, a notion Yung laughs off; he considers Wind a detour and not much more. It’s clear, however, that he’s more at home with personal drama that dives into his characters’ mindsets. Based on a 2010 Tsuen Wan murder, Papa will be a disappointment to those looking for a sensational true crime drama or a police procedural. Yung is far less interested in the what and how of an act of violence than in what comes after. 

The film stars Lau Ching-wan as Yuen Wing-nin, the owner of a one-time 24-hour cha chaan teng in a busy corner of Hong Kong. We meet Nin in the aftermath of the gruesome murder of his wife Yin (Jo Kuk Cho-lam), and daughter Grace (Lainey Hung Nok-yi) at the hands of his 15-year-old son Ming (first-timer Dylan So Man-to), and watch as he tries to put his life back together. It’s as much an exercise in tone and emotion as it is a crime drama. It’s a non-linear narrative in which insignificant little moments come to have great meaning in the long run, and where we as viewers struggle to make sense of Ming’s actions alongside Nin. The insecurity of what we know is entirely the point, one compounded by Ming’s struggle with mental health. 

“I did want to point out that health care in Ming’s situation is handled by the corrections office, not the Hospital Authority,” says Yung. “People suffering from schizophrenia are treated as criminals, not as people who are mentally ill. The bigotry towards families dealing with schizophrenia is very serious.”

Papa is Yung’s most formally and stylistically accomplished film, and it gracefully exploits the medium itself. Yung drops us into the action without indicating when in the story it is, and proceeds to move back and forth in time and space, never allowing viewers to get a firm grasp on the events. Combined with a claustrophobic 4:3 image ratio rather than standard widescreen 16:9, director of photography Chin Ting-chang (Taiwanese historical epic Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale) helps Yung paint an impressionistic portrait of a man trying to piece his shattered life back together.

“The movie is about Nin’s recollections, and memory is only impressions,” says Yung. He says he put together a more linear edit for entry to Cannes, but after a few colleagues saw it, their response was that the movie lost its essence with a more conventional structure. The squarer, compressed framing strips the film of the glossy excess that can come with widescreen photography. “I want people to forget they’re watching a movie, but rather something intimate,” says Yung. “TV has always been more intimate.” Despite the tragic story, Papa has a hopeful ending that suggests some kind of catharsis can be found even amid the direst of circumstances.

Yung is fortunate to call himself a full-time director, working on scripts and advertising between films. Occasionally he produces, as he did for Ho Cheuk-tin’s modest 2022 hit The Sparring Partner – also based on a true Hong Kong crime. Clearly at home in the genre, Yung thinks it unlikely he’ll leave it any time soon. In fact, his next script is one based on the 1975 Happy Valley cardboard box murder. But he maintains the behaviours that lead to murder are what’s most intriguing about exploring the grimmer side of human nature. Besides, “I wouldn’t have a clue how to make a cops and gangsters movie, or a romance,” he finishes. “I just don’t know about those.”

Papa opens in cinemas on December 5.