Amphetamine

Once upon a time there was a Mainland-born Hong Kong-raised Chinese-Australian who called himself Scud. On his return to Hong Kong, as a bought-out IT company founder with lots of cash, he decided to make a movie trilogy, as any egocentric with sufficient funds might think of doing.

Scud made a docu-fable about Hong Kong's almost invisible baseball team. He called it City Without Baseball, which Hong Kong is, and got many of the team's members to frolic and assume revelatory positions in the nude. Maybe they asked him to make a pretty film about their frolicking. Whatever, it was technically highly proficient, surely because writer-producer and self-proclaimed director Scud had the nous to get an experienced film-maker, Lawrence Lau, to enact his directorial ideas. Lots of smooth Chinese skin, discreet strokes, skinny dipping, lustful stares, side glances, intense embraces and conversations fraught with angst.

Scud's second script seemed much more personal, featuring an affluent bilingual gay returnee from Australia who falls in love with a neurotic hunk of Hong Kong handsomeness who's a straight with subconscious gay leanings. The frustrated central character is an IT whiz who has had some sort of affair with an Arab Israeli, has a gorgeous apartment with a rooftop gym and, what a coincidence, has made a film about Hong Kong baseball. As far as soft-porn gay movies go, Permanent Residence went quite far with its in-your-face nude scenes, admirable homosexual characters and first-class technical qualities.

Although the film's plot was overly complicated, melodramatic and over-romanticised, it was attractively OTT. Less acceptably, its ending was a morbid anti-climax in which the object of affection chose to solve his personality issues by riding his motorbike off the end of a pier in Surfers Paradise.

Scud clearly identified with the plot, as he's reprised it for his third movie, Amphetamine. This time, there's a returnee from Oz (Daniel, played by somewhat wooden Tom Price) who's a finance industry whiz kid constantly asserting that everything in life is a piece of cake. He meets a straightish drug-habituated swimming instructor called Kafka (yep, we are told a gweilo named him that) who's been raped by a trio of gangsters in a tunnel. Love and lust blossom for Daniel, but Kafka plays hard to get.

Of course, audiences aren't allowed to see how hard he (or anyone else in the movie) actually played, because Scud wanted to be sure that his soft-porn movie could be released with a Category III rating. The lead actors play soft, though Daniel is noticeably more reticent about full-frontal nudity than Kafka until their underwater scene at the end of the movie.

Fans of Scud will not be surprised that Kafka also notes that he'd appeared as a model in the photo book of a film that had been called something like Permanent Residence, but hadn't been in it. In reality, Byron Pang is a competent screen actor, small and almost perfectly formed. His character's three changes of hair-style display varying images of Hong Kong cuteness and may be designed to depict Kafka's progression from adult-looking facial-haired cynicism to short-cut juvenile dreaming.

Has Scud himself progessed? Yes, and no. The irrelevant overseas location work (Bangkok, the Dead Sea and Queensland) added nothing to Permanent Residence; this time the only non-Hong Kong setting is a mainland police station. Otherwise, there are many deja vu plot details, another party scene in which Scud can flaunt his lead character's wealth of possessions and loving colleagues, and, unforgivably, another morbid ending. Symbolism runs rampant again, most risibly in the bird's nest Kafka constructs on high, on a high.

Hong Kong viewers may be perturbed by one guest appearance. Anyone who's known of Paul Fonoroff as a knowledgeable Mandarin-speaking veteran American movie reviewer will cringe at his appearance as a rich swimming-pool customer seeking satisfaction from Kafka and grinning gleefully at being allowed to pay a fortune for very little.

Scud's playfulness (some might say, immaturity) is paraded in the opening titles. Who'd have thought of noticing that Amphetamine (our heroes' drug of choice) includes the words Am, He and Mine?