Echoes of the rainbow

Good directors never let us know how manipulative they've been. Less good directors make it glaringly obvious that their scripts, casting, camera angles, music, editing, and all other tricks of the movie trade were designed to draw tears and cheers from audiences. Their movies are the cinematic equivalent of being force-fed an overdose of sugar.

When such a movie wins awards, I worry about the judges' capability to be objective observers of movie-makers. Echoes of the Rainbow, a 2009 Hong Kong movie, won the, take a breath ... Crystal Bear for Best Film in the Children's Jury "Generation Kplus" Category at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival. A cynic might suspect that it had little competition, or that the rest of the global movie industry didn't send any crates of sugar to Berlin, or that the Jury was indeed composed of children -- who merrily identified with the impertinent, inquisitive and thieving character of the younger son.

He lives in an urban community's back street, supposedly in Kowloon's Sham Shui Po but filmed on location in Hong Kong's only suitable surviving 1960s-style block, the Island's Wing Lee Street. It's a row of scruffy three-storey shop-houses that was scheduled to be redeveloped by Hong Kong's official Urban Renewal Authority.

Screenwriter and director Alex Law Kai-yui reportedly wanted to create a tribute to his older brother and hard-working parents. It is unimportant whether there was a grouchy soft-centred father who ran a shoe-making shop in the 1960s and if Laws's brother was a handsome musically-gifted prize student and champion athlete at the prestigious Diocesan Boys School.

Was his mother actually a broom-wielding soft-centred lady who wore neat make-up and cotton trouser suits? Did the brother develop a loving friendship with a super-rich girl who lived in a hillside mansion? Is the whole movie a fantasy?

Naturally. Only a movie family could experience so many attractive disasters and cliched situations (class differences, colonial-era corruption, typhoon, honourable Peking doctors, terminal leukemia, etc) in a collage of hackneyed movie settings (rain, blood-stained snow, stone corridors, running tracks, aquaria, frosted glass etc). Only a movie mother could name her new shoes Hard Times and Good Times, because one always follows the other, doesn't it? Aaah, you may sigh, but the plot gets stuffed even more a la pate de movie gras.

The quartet of lead actors do wonders with stilted dialogue and 1960s-style affectations. Simon Yam and Sandra Ng are admirable parental role models with hearts of gold, and each of them restrains their normal scenery-chewing personas. The first-timer child actor, Buzz Chung, plays the irritating younger brother well, with charm and fortissimo screams. And the new pop starlet making his screen debut as the older brother is handsomely pensive. Aarif Lee also sings, and co-wrote, the closing song. It's as OTT as the very non-1960s very short shorts which are draped around the tops of Lee's thighs whenever the script makes it decently possible.

Ironies marked this film's unexpected success in Berlin. Although the movie was more than enough of a heritage project in itself for the doomed Wing Lee Street, the Hong Kong Government performed its quickest-ever U-turn and forestalled any public pressure by declaring the lane a protected site of historical interest.

Consequently, the Urban Redevelopment folks must have been very displeased with colleagues in the Hong Kong Government Film Development Fund, which financed the film that frustrated their plans.

Third, several Hong Kong film directors provided guest appearances and may well feel twinges of professional envy that Law's sugary concoction has earned such rewards. Ann Hui shines as usual in her cameo, fleshing out the role of the school teacher scolding the mischievous boy.

Will the movie triumph at the next Hong Kong Film Awards? For the actors, probably. For Alex Law, it shouldn't. His basic plot was filmed, more sincerely and credibly, three decades ago in Allen Fong's first feature, Father & Son. That was part of the Hong Kong New Wave. It waved goodbye long ago. In the 21st Century, the local Film Fund should be financing innovativeness, not movie mothballs.