The Innocence of Love in Jill Leung’s Debut Film

Filmmaker Jill Leung Lai-yin remembers when there were VHS and VCD rental shops all over Hong Kong. “They would put a TV outside the shop and people would stand there and watch the movies. And I was always one of them,” he says. One of his earliest memories is watching Wong Jing’s 1989 action-comedy classic God of Gamblers on the street, and it planted the seeds of what would become a career. “When it came time to choose a university and think about my future, I applied to every school in Hong Kong that offered any kind of film degree,” he adds with a chuckle.

As he speaks, Leung is perched on a stool in the hidden corner of K11’s Art House cinema most visitors breeze past on their way to the IMAX auditorium, where Leung’s feature directorial debut, Last Song for You (久別重逢), screened the night before. Last Song is an ambitious, old-fashioned sentimental love story that doesn’t wallow in tragedy and, notably, isn’t afraid to get a little weird – but without making its weirdness a gimmick. And yes, Leung is a little worried about how it’s going to be received.

“I’m very nervous, because I think the movie is… courageous,” he says after taking a second to contemplate what he means. “It’s like it’s trying something new for Hong Kong, which hasn’t had this kind of romance for quite a while – meaning a poetic story that’s built on something more commercial. I really like romance, and personally I think, globally, there hasn’t been a proper romance for quite a while. There are movies about relationships, but a lack of films about faith in love.”

He could be right. Big, earnest romances along the lines of The Notebook, The Lunchbox, Brief Encounter or In the Mood for Love are rare these days, with romantic-comedy dominating the space after a brief lull in the 1990s. Japan and South Korea regularly pump out romantic tearjerkers like Be With You, We Made a Beautiful Bouquet and A Moment to Remember, but their reliance on terminal illness as a narrative device makes those films a sub-genre on their own. 

Leung’s love of love was born at his high school’s film society, which introduced him to Shunji Iwai’s enduring 1995 classic Love Letter, whose influence on Last Song is clear. But also making their presence felt are films like John Carney’s Begin Again and Wei Te-sheng’s Cape No. 7. The result is something much like Hong Kong itself: a mash-up of influences with a dash of local flavour thrown in.

Leung is probably the last person anyone with a passing knowledge of contemporary Hong Kong cinema would guess might make a fantastical, musical romance about regret and second chances. After watching all those movies on the street, Leung wound up attending City University’s School of Creative Media, where he learnt screenwriting from Hong Kong New Wave icon Patrick Tam. He landed his first post-graduation job interning for actor-producer Eric Tsang on a film just going into production: Pang Ho-cheung’s Men Suddenly in Black (2003). It was Leung’s first credit. From there, he worked as a production assistant and script supervisor for Tam on After this Our Exile. After getting a feel for the business, he kicked around until 2007, when he started writing in earnest. 

Considering the prevalence of the genre, it is perhaps unsurprising that he broke out by penning martial arts and action films, starting with Tsui Siu-ming’s Champions (2008) and following with Juno Mak’s Rigor Mortis in 2012 (co-written with Philip Yung). He also worked on Soi Cheang’s SPL 2: A Time of Consequences (2015) and Wilson Yip’s final two Ip Man instalments (with Chan Tai-lee) in 2015 and 2019. He credits Cheang, Yip and script mentor Szeto Kam-yuen, who he asked to critique his early work, with shaping his development as a writer. 

The road from those martial arts movies to Last Song for You wasn’t obvious. But to call the film a simple romance belies the larger ideas Leung has woven into the story: ideas about fear of the unknown, of change, nostalgia for better times – a running theme in recent Hong Kong films like A Light Never Goes Out and Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In – the idea that we can make things better, and that there’s room in everyday life for innocence.

“I think life is a series of cycles of ups and downs, and in the lows there’s a sense of loss, for the city itself, for physical things like the record store in the film, and a connection to our inner child,” says Leung. “When we’re young all our sensitivities open up but as we age we block them off. Music is like that. It may not visually take you to the past, but it will take your senses and emotions to the past.”

Last Song revolves around washed-up Cantopop songwriter So Sing-wah (actual Cantopop star Ekin Cheng Yee-kin), wallowing in a state of alcohol-fuelled self-loathing, who agrees to a trip to Japan to scatter the ashes of Ha Man-huen, an unrequited high school sweetheart who left a lasting impression on him. The request comes from her daughter, Summer, who’s a dead ringer for her mother (both are played by Natalie Hsu Yan-yi), and she inadvertently takes So on a trip into his past just as he reaches the lowest point in his life. In revisiting his younger self — played by Mirror member Ian Chan Cheuk-yin — and the friendship with Ha that was kindled over a single song, he finds the spark he seems to have lost, and manages to finish writing a new track for a young emerging singer. 

It should be noted all this happens because Leung shamelessly deploys supernatural elements that don’t typically belong in romantic dramas. But to his credit — and the credit of the cast — it works, mostly because no one treats those elements as anything but ordinary. In treating the extraordinary as ordinary, Leung turns the film into the kind of old-fashioned romance, complete with happy ending do-over, that wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1950s.

Leung admits there is a lot of himself and his struggle with imposter syndrome in Last Song. Cheng and Chan were the filmmaker’s first choices to play So Sing-wah for what he sees as their innate sensitivity and compassion, and complementing positions as respected elder statesman and representative of the future – of art, music or Hong Kong itself. Leung found their personalities similar enough to support So’s character arc, and both could carry the title song by musical director Chan Kwong-wing, Cheng’s long time producer and a composer on films like The Storm Riders and the Infernal Affairs trilogy.

“[Ekin Cheng] is from that generation of actors that effortlessly embodies a quality of uncertainty at times, of questioning himself, and he also possesses a sense of wisdom on how to achieve balance in this world,” says Leung. “Ian [Chan], in some ways, is very similar to Ekin. He’s an optimist, and thinks that if he works hard he can achieve his goals.”

Leung describes the film as a romance as well as an introspective exploration of the self, one powered by his own self-doubt. To echo earlier comments, he’s right. The film is courageous for how it grafts several potentially competing parts — romance, drama, music, fantasy — onto each other. As if that weren’t enough, Leung also admits to putting a lot of what he considers the unknown into the script. 

“When I imagined what my first film would be I always thought about how we kind of live in a bubble; that we know very little about the world,” he says. “There’s a lot of unexplainable and unknowable [things] in the world, which changes so rapidly we have a new realisation every day of what the world we live in is.” He offers a plea for what is essentially childishness, or at least childlike innocence; each of us should be able to find their own Ha Man-huen, the person who makes them feel confident, and with whom they can be as free-spirited as a child. Spoken like a true romantic.

Last Song for You is in theatres now.