How Pang Ho-cheung’s early black comedies disrupted Hong Kong cinema

Before he became a film festival darling with Isabella (2006) and defined a generation’s romantic cynicism with Love in a Puff (2010), writer-director Pang Ho-cheung was a published novelist injecting a much-needed dose of dark satire into a flagging Hong Kong film industry in the early 2000s. Emerging in an era when producers largely demanded formulaic dollops of action, melodramatic romance or sex, Pang’s first two directorial efforts cut through the commercial noise, signalling the arrival of a distinctly irreverent mind. To satisfy these commercial constraints without sacrificing his satirical voice, the first-time director set his witty and original black comedy You Shoot, I Shoot in the world of a hitman – a high-stakes scenario that guaranteed the required action elements while effortlessly securing financial backing. The result was the second funniest comedy of 2001 – Stephen Chow Sing-chi’s Shaolin Soccer was number one – and one of the best comic outings of the entire decade. “Forget about such bloated summer films as Para Para Sakura, The Legend of Zu, Love on a Diet and Fulltime Killer,” wrote South China Morning Post critic Paul Fonoroff that year. “A low-budget black comedy, shot on a shoestring budget, has beaten them all for freshness and originality. You Shoot, I Shoot ranks close to Shaolin Soccer as the season’s most entertaining picture.” An impressive debut Written and directed by Pang, and co-scripted by comedian Vincent Kok Tak-chiu, You Shoot, I Shoot features Eric Kot Man-fai as Bart, a broke hitman in desperate need of cash. When a rich society woman offers to pay him to document the assassinations he carries out, he forces former film student Li (Cheung Tat-ming) to make short features of them. Chaos ensues when the duo become too involved in the filmmaking process, resulting in a zany restaging of a past hit to secure extra footage for the editing room. The direction is impressive for the debutant Pang, and the mini-films of the murders – in what Li calls his “Scorsese style” – are brilliantly edited vignettes in their own right. A lengthy dialogue-free montage of the duo committing numerous hits and capturing them on camera is cleverly done and more sophisticated than most local productions of the time. Pang pokes fun at the Hong Kong film industry, making numerous friendly jibes at its high-speed practices – You Shoot, I Shoot was itself shot in just 15 days. For instance, Li demands that Bart give him more time to edit their footage, noting that Scorsese “spends around three months on the sound alone”. Pang also depicts a Category III film director who is so uninterested in his job that he does not care that his Japanese starlet cannot understand a word of his instructions. The film successfully “spoofs the oft-intertwined cinema and gangster scenes, at the same time illuminating the mercenary and enterprising sides of Hong Kong society,” Fonoroff wrote. Fabulous follow-up While You Shoot, I Shoot did not make much of a dent at the local box office despite receiving positive reviews, Pang’s follow-up effort, Men Suddenly in Black (2003), was a big hit. It won Pang the best new director award at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and he was heralded as a filmmaker whose fresh approach could breathe new life into a declining industry. Although it is a well-crafted production, like many comedies, it has dated quite noticeably. The way that the female characters are treated either as figures of fun or simply as sex objects may appear offensive today, even if Pang intended to make the male leads, rather than the women, look bad. As Hong Kong writer Lawrence Pun Kwok-ling noted in 2003: “Though promoted as a ‘macho film for chicks’, the women in the film are stereotypical – bossy housewives, ‘handbag’ professionals [tai-tais] and superstition freaks … the film takes our sympathy for these pathetic men for granted … Men Suddenly in Black, at the end of the day, is made from the male perspective.” Similarly, Pang’s story of four men – played by Eric Tsang Chi-wai, Jordan Chan Siu-chun, Chapman To Man-chat and Jia Zongchao – hitting the town to pick up girls while their wives are away seems like something out of a Hollywood “battle of the sexes” comedy from the 1950s. Pang intended to make the film seem a bit old-fashioned. “Despite the humour laced with up-to-the-minute references, the sexism and morality are strictly of the variety that permeates Cantonese pictures of an earlier era,” Fonoroff wrote in his South China Morning Post review. “Pang states his inspiration was the 1969 comedy Clever Wives and Stupid Husbands. These Lotharios may talk incessantly about ‘doing it’, but in the end they’re as chaste as Doris Day and come to the same conclusions about the sanctity of relationships.” There are certainly some humorous moments. The scene on the plane where the wives conclude that their husbands are planning infidelities by reading out film reviews from the in-flight magazine – Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction is showing – is reminiscent of the nuttiness of You Shoot, I Shoot. Although it is not part of the triad genre, Men Suddenly in Black is filmed in the style of a gangster movie, with Tsang playing the de facto role of the quartet’s Big Brother. References are made to some of the classic local crime features of the 1990s, specifically 1991’s To Be Number One, as well as Hollywood’s Al Pacino/Robert De Niro crime flick Heat (1995). As the film is noticeably slicker than Pang’s debut, some critics felt that he had abandoned his signature quirkiness to try to ensure a box-office hit. Pang denied this, telling the Chinese-language Cinespot online journal: “People said, ‘Pang Ho-cheung is starting to go mainstream!’ But that wasn’t really the case. It’s mainly because I thought it was fun, so I did it. Then, when it was finished, I realised that it was more commercial than before.” Incidentally, the Hong Kong film predated the Hollywood dumb-comedy wave, which featured similar groups of clueless men trying to get into trouble, beginning with 2009’s The Hangover. In this regular feature series on the best of Hong Kong cinema, we examine the legacy of classic films, re-evaluate the careers of its greatest stars, and revisit some of the lesser-known aspects of the beloved industry. Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook

How Pang Ho-cheung’s early black comedies disrupted Hong Kong cinema

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The writer-director’s You Shoot, I Shoot (2001) and Men Suddenly in Black (2003) injected a dose of dark satire into a waning local industry

The writer-director’s You Shoot, I Shoot (2001) and Men Suddenly in Black (2003) injected a dose of dark satire into a waning local industry