Night & fog

Ann Hui, a consistently good and personal director, studied an arch-typical Hong Kong "New Town", Tin Shui Wai, twice.

In The Way We Are [Tin Shui Wai Night and Day in Cantonese], she showed sweet-natured ordinary Hongkongers (a single mother and her teenage son) helping an elderly neighbour. The next year, in 2009, [Tin Shui Wai] Night and Fog, her production team focused on the true story of a family's murder-suicide in the distant New Territories residential outpost. The juxtaposition felt deliberate, as if Hui felt the need to absolve and bless Tin Shui Wai.

Dubbed "Hong Kong's City of Sadness" by the local media, the town had previously been covered sensationally by Laurence Lau's Beseiged City. Like other New Territories urbanisations (nearby Yuen Long and Tuen Mun gaining much media attention), Tin Shui Wai became associated with social problems, notably prostitution, gangs, suicide and unhappy cross-border marriages.

Hui's docudrama is gripping, even though its tragic outcome (stabbing to death of a family of four) is shown in the opening scenes. She highlights the greenery and spaciousness of the new town, and shows that it has a supportive social network (albeit comprising over-worked local councilors, immature social workers, an ill-equipped battered wives' shelter and a police force that cannot interfere in family disputes). Hui's reconstructions of the thoughts and actions of everyone involved, plus neighbours, family members locally and in the Mainland, also seem realistic but it appears that she could only scratch the surface. A fully fictionalised account might have found clearer reasons for a tragedy.

A middle-aged man brought his second bride and their young twin daughters from Sichuan into a government housing block in Tin Shui Wai. An unemployed renovation worker, surviving on social security and daily catches of fish, he's mentally disturbed, but only mildly at first. The young wife works as a waitress in a noodles cafe. Their initial passion in China is illustrated clearly, but it isn't made clear how they met (in Shenzhen?) or why their romance had died by the time of her arrival in Hong Kong.

Short-tempered to a dangerous extent, bitter, and feeling tricked, humiliated and unloved by the younger woman, the man lashes out and ejects her and the girls from the apartment. Reading between the movie's blurred lines, the woman and her Mainland family were probably conniving peasants eager to take advantage of a boastful Hong Kong man. His seduction of a sister-in-law is designed to minimise pity for his situation.

Simon Yam fits the role well. Many of Hong Kong's former romantic idols matured handsomely as actors, and Yam is one of the best examples of a star not afraid to sport a balding head, paunchy stomach, bad teeth and murderous leer. The young Mainland actress facing him (Jingchu Zhang) is less credible, her sweet-natured face not registering the depth of emotions that the audience needs to believe she provoked in her husband.