July Rhapsody

Can living a lie with passion and sincerity make it true? A question richly confronted from many angles…

In raw terms, turn-of-century Hong Kong (1997-2002) saw some of the most uncertain times the modern industry ever endured. Evidently, that was not resultant of any imminent political changes that most fears had hinged upon, but a variety of other factors that saw an astonishingly high majority of releases altogether being flops for which the luckier ones almost broke even. Not counting the above-the-industry Jackie and Stephen, light, fluffy romantic comedies and sometimes overlapping youth movies clearly came to rule the roost and were the only things with even loosely consistent success; in fact, the Twins had just debuted in 2002 with no less than 3 releases. Ironically, as Western niche audiences started eating up Johnnie To/Wa Ka-Fai’s crime movies, domestically that field was of less interest than ever, to the point that even the aforementioned directors shifted towards and cranked out romantic potboilers like never before (as by 2001, even the Andy Lau-starring Running Out of Time 2 was a flop).

Yet in what almost everyone else saw as a dire situation, for HK’s few very New Wave/art film luminaries who were still very active, such trying times proved conversely fertile creative ground. Those grounds saw many unorthodox results: Stanley Kwan started concentrating on making and producing adult movies on taboo sexuality; Wong Kar-Wai made and produced his movies (and commercials) via overseas shoots, funding, and marketing respectively; while Ann Hui in the most relatively radical move of all put out the most ostensibly mainstream and commercial sequence of movies of her career. It was a sequence of (excepting 1999’s Ordinary Heroes) glossily produced movies on trendy genre themes (epic romance, ghost story, police thriller) featuring big star casts, including what turned out to be the final role of Hong Kong’s preeminent airwave and screen diva, Anita Mui.

Kwok (Jacky Cheung, Perhaps Love) is a high school teacher at a dead end. While there’s nothing “wrong” with his family life, he’s feeling more and more distanced from wife Ching (Anita Mui, Rouge) and high school slacker son Lui (Jin Hui). Things seem better with university senior son On (Shuan Tam, Bursting Point) who bonds with his father in more open and easygoing fashion, but he’s feeling a growing, less tangible distance from the family himself. The job offers little respite; as Kwok’s colleagues and higher-ups get ever more concerned (and successful) with the PR and business ends of education, as a teacher of the Chinese classics Lam is just struggling to instill poetry, philosophy, culture and the kind of meaning in his student’s lives that he may have a harder time finding himself. Carrying memories and inspiration from his old teacher Shing (Tou Chung-Hua, Loving You) to his rather older one Mencius (372-290 BC), he seems woefully ill-equipped to make sense of modern life or even thought.

Kwok’s every little listen to his son’s cacophonous, vulgar music, every little heightening of bewilderment towards the foolishness and shallowness of his colleague’s chatter and even administrative decisions, and every little corruption of society he sees from UK/US/Japanese cultural encroachment sinks him into a deeper fear he’ll soon be left behind like his wife (not that that’s a problem or even necessarily undesirable for a wife) without something else to fill in that void. Enter one of Kwok’s most… promising students, Woo (Karena Lam, Heroic Duo). Woo clearly has something about her that makes her stand out — regarding of course her spirit and thoughtfulness in her studies — but that’s concurrently undermined by her general air of nonchalance. Reluctant but seeing potential, Kwok comes to tutor and guide her out of class; yet Woo’s reciprocated, amplified enthusiasm towards her teacher goes beyond mere determination to do better, thereby catching Kwok off guard at a most vulnerable juncture.

Just as Kwok is getting dubiously closer to his student, his wife is curiously reconnecting with her ex more out of claimed obligation…

While it had already become pretty common practice during the Golden Age, turn of the century HK cinema was the absolute peak period of industry synchronisation (and demands) where nearly every major movie star became a music star and nearly every major music star became a movie star. No less so for an Ann Hui production than anyone else’s, that fact of life very much reflected in July Rhapsody’s cast (pan-Chinese though it also is), with all three stars and a few others notably including Race Wong and Eric Kot (though hip-hop and DJing for his case) hailing from the music industry. Main stars Mui and Cheung however are holdovers from the previous era; they’re thereby given a subtle recalibrated resonance when reciting classical Cantonese poetry together, drolly hearkening not back but forward to their duets in modern Chinese ballads.

Mui, in fact, was one of the original, most powerful factors in shifting the industry in that direction. By this reviewer’s estimation, she was the very best as well, with her only competition being contemporary Leslie Cheung — who also happened to have his final role (Inner Senses) the same month (which even more coincidentally happened to have Karena Lam in it as co-star). There was always something eminently romantic about how Mui chose to close out the final months of her life dedicated to her fans on the concert stage. But on a movie front, July Rhapsody ended up being the closest equivalent project. Tellingly, for 2001 right before this, Mui did three unabashedly modest movies between To and Wai’s period mo lei tau comedy Wu Yen, and two extra-light music-themed movies in karaoke comedy Let’s Sing Along and Andrew Lau’s all-star but too leisurely for its own good Dance of a Dream. (I never came across her other 2001 movie — indeed her most obscure and hard-to-find of all later ones — Midnight Fly.)      

Despite Rhapsody’s — key? Monumental? Tragic? — status as Mui’s final film role, the diva who’d played superheroes, warrior princesses, monarchs, spies, monarch-spies and goddesses ended on a more outwardly low-key note than previously imaginable: as an adamantly conflict-averse, dedicated housewife with all her apparent dominant concerns being those of fulfilling duties. She’s very casually introduced only about 13 minutes into the film doing routine housewife stuff, out of touch with trends and most technological developments, and passively giving suggestions that in fact already went unheeded — perhaps even more foreign of an act for her than the monarchs or spies who at least carried her same sense of moxie.

One may — and is in fact implicitly encouraged to — contrast that with the freshly vivacious alternative presented in Woo. The camera’s frankly alluring manner of introducing the sultry schoolgirl in addition to how she’s continually seen and heard (and angled) through much of the film — whether sauntering out of the library aisles or sliding to the edge of her desk ignoring class — may seem alarmingly out of character for Hui, or even something more becoming of the early part of a swankier Category III film. (This, after all, is from the same director who even methodically avoided sexualisation of Cherie Chung as a bubbly prostitute on 1981’s The Story of Woo Viet.) But that would be missing the point, as Woo comes to be and represent a conduit into Lam’s state of mind even as she makes her own overtures to sink him further into it through her precocious reading of it.

The cosmopolitan Woo indeed doesn’t seem to so much as be in the same dimension as Kwok with his “model wife,” kid her age, and traditional Chinese culture (is she really Chinese anyway?! HK is Asia’s Global City) and ways he’s trying to foist upon her. Kwok is making a perhaps more conscious than subconscious effort to direct and keep his own focus on the unpolished nature of her work — but is that to remind him why she’s there, or provide all the more an excuse for getting closer to her? Either way, her shortcomings are his shield, his exoneration, while his forgiveness/overlooking of them conversely accumulates his guilt. Woo’s cheeky insouciance and sometimes stinging reminders of their age gap should be an even more natural source of repulsion, but it boomerangs into a source of complacency for how lucky he therefore is; if anything, it would almost be nice to get that kind of open pushback from his wife once in a while to remind they’re a real couple.

Through it all, even when showing the perspective of another at face value, the camera and performances subtly signal their calibration back to the objects of that perspective. In short, Hui deftly re-integrated her style into contemporary mainstream filmmaking and sensibilities with what unveils as only artificial compromise. As such, Rhapsody didn’t do great at the box office, but didn’t do badly either which still put it above the vast majority of non-rom-coms or superstar vehicles of the period. While the film was literally all over the 2002 (21st) Hong Kong Film Awards ceremony with nominations in over half the categories it was eligible for (plus several more from Hui’s film months earlier, Visible Secret), regarding actual winners Lam would be one of the only two and the only one with two (for Best New Performer and Best Supporting Actress). The way she asserts her presence in this film — whether on the screen, to the other performers or to the story itself — left little doubt as to why that was the case, for her case at least.

One of the few universal, perennial controversies across pretty much any developed societies (but that’s still little problem across most others) is that of both the suitability and the viability of teacher-student relationships that are turned into teacher-student relationships. In most cases they will be seen as not only a societal burden with instant cause for scrutiny, but a personal one as well. They’re also inevitably questioned in their sincerity, notwithstanding just how subconscious the process of falling for someone — requited, unrequited or ambiguously flowed with — can be. That can even (or especially) be the case if it’s someone obviously attractive but that much more obviously off-limits whether because of feeling out of one’s league or purview or out of one’s proper boundaries. For that, Rhapsody’s example also hints how alternately ambiguous and amorphous the power dynamics between teacher and student can be until next thing one knows, they’ve faded… or even shifted.

Yet the film also flips and swivels that concept around the audience to both deeper and wider questions about the psychological (or physical) burdens of responsibility from them. Both sides of the equation can actually (and dangerously easily) come to hold the power to destroy the other’s life in different ways, yet even in the face of that the more immediate power that’s quite enough in itself lies in the power to gently humiliate. In what’s already intrinsically delicate romance, Kwok’s pleasurable pride of having a hold over his “best” student is offset if not threatened by the spiritually masochistic capitulation to her immature fancies. Those are phenomena best communicated through Kwok defenselessly following a couple steps behind Woo in a manner becoming of the most elegant concubine of his classics (if only he were elegant or a concubine) when in her territory (the mall — or maybe even the bar).

Where did all of this come from? Does Woo simply want to do Kwok a favour by making him cool again/for the first time? Maybe in all of her Japanese studies and informal interests (indeed all the rage in turn of the century HK especially) she’s learned a thing or two about enjo kōsai (indeed all the rage in turn of the century Japan especially) while repositioning herself as the hunter with Kwok as ideal prey for it? Though perpetual societal emphasis is placed upon the idea of youth rebellion that to be fair Woo can by all means be accused of, cases such as this call attention to why such was seldom ascribed towards its more powerful enabler of adult rebellion. But upon further thought, it’s likely pretty much the same reason and dynamic as why the burden of judgement and stigma of “home wreckers” falls on females: who runs the show controls the flow of blame too, thereby doubly troubling the waters for a girl student.   

What might that source of blame truly be in turn then? A man in post-epiphanic desperation to rectify all of life’s previously missed or regretfully declined possibilities? Or perhaps one in a mad rush to find the fountain of youth not for himself but in someone else? Back to Woo in that case, that same cooperative leap into the unknown may ironically suggest a preemptive endeavor to avoid getting trapped into a conventional life that’s especially incessantly demanded of the respectable woman she’s all but destined to be before long — unless she throws a liberatingly ruinous hex upon herself. Either way, upon realising their sometimes strikingly similar development, atrophy or inherent capriciousness in life, could teen angst + midlife crisis really possibly make for good chemistry? (Even if it does, the spontaneous combustion is liable to burn all around it then possibly themselves — but a lit teacher wouldn’t grasp that any better than his student.) 

Nearly all of those rhapsodic outpourings of unease, discontent and desperation are suppressed or concealed within the idyllic ideals of the romantic and familial bonds always promised to be stronger than them. At its best, the meticulously developed ambiguity of mood reaches moments of ethereal ennui matching the cadence of Woo’s narrated essay. It all couldn’t fully materialise without enthrallingly dynamic cinematography from the underrated if unprolific Kwan Pun-Leung, who’s best known in the West for 2046 (2004) or far more so in the Sinophone world for More Than Blue (2018). Conversely among hundreds of credits, Eric Kwong’s editing here is more key than ever, as conversations are synced into montages of bittersweet flashbacks, border crossings, and character shifts to seemingly clairvoyantly sensed pain. Their rapport is most evident in the poignantly silent segue into Ching’s shattering sense of powerlessness towards things it’s not even of her nature to try to stop if they’re to happen.

Then is everything really just a rhapsody after all? Perhaps Woo is just a dream girl to Lam and even more so a dream girlfriend — unattainable even if or when somehow attained. But that is indeed part of the rhapsody’s wider-reaching theme of a diaphanous fantasy made to feel real so long as one attentively listens. Kwok’s (or Ching’s?) entire marriage and family life was just a dream — albeit one with a much more tightly bound if no more real foundation to simply keep one from waking up from it. Does the possibly innately dysfunctional nature of the family’s development already doom its arguably artificial binds? Or can they effectively be reinforced or replaced to a degree that even those trying to look away can see them again? What wouldn’t even sound like a question worth asking steadily becomes a more serious part of a seemingly improvised thesis; one that seems to develop with deeper questions rather than arguments and answers with every passing scene.

Such pressing questions are not merely intended for the protagonists to attempt to sort out; especially by the time it becomes evident how poor or acquiescent they often are in it. Should the audience sympathise more (or less?) with a bright and lovely young girl potentially forfeiting her future for a fling? Or a man taking that much more imminent risk not only with his present but those around him as well — but who’d already sacrificed so much for what’s ever more apparent to be so little? The multilayered intricacy of the narrative nevertheless requires the strong directorial, cinematographic and musical support that it thankfully has to show its strength. It’s all hidden then gradually, rivetingly unraveled beneath Rhapsody’s easygoing slice-of-life nature, resulting in quite possibly the finest screenplay from Ivy Ho — this film’s other HKFA winner — rivaled only by the more effectively charming but less pensively nuanced Comrades, Almost a Love Story (1996).

One of the best Hong Kong films of the era — one of the worst eras of Hong Kong films — July Rhapsody is made to stand out all the more as an anomalously sophisticated, pensive and challenging film in deceptively modest, mainstream and even edgy clothing. Its calculated refusal to hold its characters under the pressuring microscope of its lens or messaging — for as much power as it would’ve had to do so if it had wanted — only further bolsters its unlikely air as sensitively provocative. It’s instead a film realistically validating the deepest human flaws, vices and weaknesses, with their hosts ensconced in a cinematic space respecting their reality that they cannot be changed from outside — and may well have been moulded that way from outside. The same pessimistic acceptance of the futility of having these issues dwelt upon, however, is what produces the more rational sanguinity that they may speak and atone for themselves as best as possible.   

“Whoa! What kind of music is this?! They’re all swearing …. Son, don’t you like Ricky Martin?”

“You think I’m a Filipina maid?!?”

July Rhapsody is released by Cheng Cheng Films form July 19, with a DVD arriving September 10, 2024. For more information see Cheng Cheng Films website.

Rhapsodic notations

Speaking of Filipina maids, 5 years after this movie was released, Jacky Cheung and his wife May Lo (Hard Boiled II) would establish quite the controversial reputation with the former group’s country, getting banned by the consulate from hiring any more maids in an unprecedented move for the time.

1 month later yet 11 years earlier, Akira Kurosawa followed up on Hui’s composition with Rhapsody in August (1991).

That may have just sounded like a silly joke and I will even accept accusals of such: But it calls attention to how rhapsodies (in musical form) really are often followed up on by different composers/arrangers, and are marked by loose continuity yet also unexpected connections and free-flowing composition, with colorful or dramatic episodes of unexpected leaps that indeed leave open the argument life can be a rhapsody. In that respect, a (locally) more famous film of the past to adopt the term in more obviously direct thematic fashion was Inoue Umetsugu’s Hong Kong Rhapsody (1968).