Love in a puff

Miriam Yeung and Shawn Yue were wise to accept the leading roles in the low-budget comedy Love in a Puff. It's a witty romcom that provides insightful glimpses into young Hongkongers' lives and loving.

Sadly, the movie was slapped with a Category III rating. As there's no violence, no hard porn or even softer nudity in creator-director Pang Ho-cheung's movie, the censors must have been glad that its dialogue (by co-writer Heiward Mak Hei-yan) was filled with salty Cantonese slang.

That was their excuse for not wanting under-18s to get access to a comedy about smokers. Even though Yeung's character (a Sephora-sponsored cosmetics saleswoman) is afflicted with asthma and shown promising to quit when she falls in love with fellow-smoker Yue ("in advertising"), she doesn't. Many of their friends - and a quartet of local cops - smoke, and their friendships seem to hinge on being members of multi-racial socially-mixed smoking cliques that gather in alleys and corners to enjoy their addiction. It would be cynical to suspect that Lucky Strike provided production funds as well as the essential props.

Within a seven-day (captioned) time frame, Yeung chases Yue, ends a five-year live-in relationship, goes to a love villa with Yue, and loses him. She finds him again during a budget-day cigarette-buying binge and they mutually agree to stop smoking. Happy ending? Anyone who left the cinema as soon as the main end credits flashed up will think so. Those who stayed a few minutes longer, thinking they were watching the traditional Hong Kong series of comical out-takes, got to see the final sting in this tale. It's a clever ending for a light but above-average romcom.

Yeung's character is identified as being older (by four years) than Yue's, but she looks almost a generation older and maturer, with a purplish wig that gives her character a soignee air that looks out of character. That makes her sudden desire for the wimpish and bespectacled Yue hard to fathom at first glance. Their courtship conversations, via SMSes as much as in person, reveal a prickly pair of self-defensive Hong Kong personalities.

The movie also reveals amusing aspects of modern Hong Kong, some predictable (karaoke and Facebook fraud), others not (sidewalk pirate lookouts, ashtray manufacture). The opening sequence is a neat short horror story (Pang being a master in the genre), and the inclusion of mockumentary interviews with the leading characters adds useful alienation and explanatory effects. The movie deserved a bigger audience, to remind Hong Kong that local cinema can supply above-average dialogue.