Not At All Tragic
Philip Yung taps his ‘Port of Call’ seediness for a portrait of a trans woman settling into who she is. yes, Philip Yung.
Cyclone
Director: Philip Yung • Writers: Philip Yung, Annabelle Li
Starring: Liu Yuqiao, Edwynn Li, Jenny Suen, Leung Kwan-leun
Hong Kong • 1hr 59mins
Opens Hong Kong October 2 • III
Grade: B+
At the beginning of Philip Yung Chi-kwong’s Cyclone | 超風, a far cry from the fluff of The Snowball on a Sunny Day and the true crime grit of Papa, trans sex worker Ye Chiu-feng, or Cyclone (Liu Yuqiao), is chugging water from a bottle like a mad person, standing outside a 7-Eleven somewhere in one of Hong Kong’s darker corners. It seems her current john has a thing for being peed on, so Cyclone is trying her best to accommodate. Things go wrong, she can’t pee a torrent and the dude comes very close to marching off without paying – operative word, he comes close to leaving. In a change of pace for the “victim” trans character Cyclone is not having it. She did her part and he’s going to pay, even if that means she has to kick the shit out of him. Which she does.
Not to condone violence, but that guy had it coming: sex workers are working, and not paying them is theft. The opening frames of Yung’s latest feature, his most assured, are outliers among mainstream films about the LGBTQ+ community and trans women in particular not by LGBTQ+ people. Yung and co-writer Annabelle Li Ka-yee, a prominent local trans researcher, activist and writer, don’t send Cyclone back to her flat battered and broke after another night of being taken advantage of. No, she pushes back like anyone would and in doing so we see how layered and complex, often conflicted in her own mind and frequently many contrasting things at once she is. In other words she’s a normal person and a complete character. It’s sad to applaud a film for having a trans character that’s complete, but here we are.
Family’s what you decide
Shot in garish nocturnal colour, warm natural tones, gritty and grainy black and white, and any combination thereof by dual DOPs Tong Woon-lam and Leung Yau-cheong, Cyclone is similarly many things at once. It’s a granular character study about finding your identity in a space where identity is both fluid and easily challenged. It’s a screed about the untenable position trans women who’ve opted out of, or have yet to undergo, gender confirmation surgery find themselves in as sexual beings. It’s also about how they’re forced to reckon with other people’s perceptions of what a woman with a penis is – and how that can be fetishised and commodified. It’s a story about agency and choosing the supportive, accepting family you want. It’s an ambitious, sensitive and empathetic piece of filmmaking, and above all it’s one in which the trans woman – who despite taking her name from the tragic heroine of Louis Cha’s classic wuxia novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes – gets her happy ever after.
Cyclone is an exile from mainland China, a trans woman who dumped her shitty family and moved to Hong Kong with the aim of scraping together enough cash for gender-affirming surgery. She has a crap gig at a chachaanteng, but makes more in sex work because she’s a “special” girl. She does most of her work at a low-rent brothel lorded over by Jinxing (Leung Kwan-leun) and his partner and den mother Fong (Sun Lai-ping). Also working for Jinxing is another mainland newcomer, Xiaomei (Jenny Suen Wo-yi), with whom Cyclone quickly bonds, and the veteran Gaga (Kiri Lyu Zhou), whose photographer husband Castle (Ip King-kin) and son Tommy (Marek Li Hoi-lam) hang around way too much. But that’s the gang, and they have each other’s back. Cyclone’s private life is spent with Bian (theatre actor Edwynn Li Yu-hin), a drug dealer and gambling addict who’s totally into her and doesn’t give a shit about her trans-ness. Their romance is sweet and sexy, at least until Bian tries to turn Tommy into a drug mule
Cyclone is not perfect. No one expects Cyclone to have a dull backstory, and gender dysphoria sounds fucking shitty, and finding the backbone to step out and live the way one feels they should is one of the hardest things anyone can do. But Cyclone piles on the small town tragedy fairly thickly, rolling in betrayal and rejection by family and friends, and tops it off with some heinous conversion therapy. Which is not to say there’s not plenty of idiotic/vicious/uncomprehending parents that have taken those steps, but the memories of life in China flirt with melodrama that could have been dialled down from 11. That said, there are plenty of fools out there who need their hands held. Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36 is a prime example of wrapping the point inside another film, in that case a political thriller. It’s a minor quibble that doesn’t detract in any way from the rest of what makes Cyclone so affecting – chief among them Liu in the lead. Liu (who is not trans) injects her performance with practised indifference, a shield against a world she expects to marginalise her, that’s perfectly calibrated in its fragility. Watching her get dressed to (maybe) go see her family, seeing her tape down her boobs and code swich in the most egregious way, is heartbreaking, but never histrionic. But Yung and Li let Cyclone experience joy too – with Bian for a bit, with Xiaomei, with her friend Vincy (Venus Leung Ying-ya), with Jinxing and the girls – and her decision to give up the money she’s been working so hard to save for surgery isn’t played as tragic. It’s played as a clear-eyed choice that she thinks is the right one – that cements who she is rather than delays its realisation.