This excellent short film explores the fumbling, first forays into romance of Hong Kong high school students…
In one scene from Affection, a boy and girl ride home on the bus after a date. The boy leans over and hesitantly attempts to kiss the girl. As she responds, he becomes more confident and slides his hand around her, before she pulls away.
The shyness, fumbling desires, and churning emotions of adolescent, high school love are the subject of this excellent short film by director Kwan Man-hin. In its exploration of Hong Kong teenage sexuality, it might be compared to Luk Yee-sum’s 2015 film Lazy Hazy Crazy, but this is a much more restrained, sensitive portrayal than that.
The story is told from the point of view of a high school girl called Jessie (Jessica Wong) whose talent for the Chinese board game Go has earned her the nickname ‘Queen Chess’. She balances her time between practising Go and hanging out with her boyfriend (Yau Hawk-sau Neo). The former seems to win for this studious girl, but it is clear she’s also seeking something to pull her out of this lonely life of late-night computer games.
An expert at strategising on the board, she is less adept at dealing with the twists and turns of affection. Her life is thrown into disarray when a series of events lead her to find out something troubling about her boyfriend.
The film does an excellent job of capturing the very distinctive kind of a life lived by Hong Kong high school students, the combination of childish innocence, lack of connection between boys and girls, and newly developing feelings. A nice scene, for instance, shows school girls standing coyly and watching a couple of boys play basketball in the playground. The whole film’s pacing is perfect – a sort of slow, dreaminess that fits well with the subject matter.
With some nice acting by the two leads, it also does a good job of capturing those fumbling, first forays into romance. This sensitive portrayal is only let down by some, at times, slightly unnatural sounding dialogue, although its hard to tell if this is also an attempt to convey the awkwardness between the couple.
Overall, Affection is a really effective evocation of high school love with a plot and camerawork that enthralled from start to finish. It is a great example of what distinctive Hong Kong cinema, exploring local stories and themes, can be.