Writer Yeung Leung-chuen turns director and lets his inner petty bitch fly with grand results.
We Are Born Good
Director: Yeung Leung-chuen • Writer: Yeung Leung-chuen
Starring: Chung Suet-ying, Alan Yeung, Ng Wing-sze, Lo Chun-yip
Hong Kong • 1hr 36mins
Opens Hong Kong October 29 • IIB
Grade: B+
We Are Born Good | 善男信女 is that rarest of FFFI features: it’s bitchy. It’s not that Love Lies, or Time Still Turns the Pages, or Blossoms Under Somewhere, or Gamer Girls are bad – or, more crucially, lack a voice. It’s just that they’re very earnest and sentimental and, for lack of a better word, positive. The programme has leaned hard into social drama, Stuntman excepted, and branded it as a factory for festival fare. And in the service of cenrtrism, most of these films carry a hopeful message on some level and end with their characters in a position to go on with their lives with more emotional balance and self-awareness. By the same token, We Are Born Good also ends with its characters finding better personal balance and self-awareness, but to get there they were vicious and petty and self-serving – and it was often as funny as fuck.
Director Yeung Leung-chuen may be a first time feature director but he’s a fairly seasoned screenwriter, having penned a heap of short films, 30 episodes of Till Death Do Us Part for ViuTV and Eric Tsang’s Hong Kong Family prior to this. And aside from a cracker of a snarky title (in Cantonese at least), We Are Born Good’s (still wise-ass in English) cleverly constructed story of an escalating beef between a neighbourhood chachaanteng owner and a budding actor is told through dark comedy but true to FFFI form, it too ends on a hopeful note. Hopeful and a little bitchy.
That tone is a welcome change of pace to the Hong Kong cinema landscape of the last few years, but also more authentic in many ways. Yeung’s script loads up on little details that paint a portrait of Hong Kong as the messy, discordant, fracturing, combustible place it actually is these days, but never judges it – or his characters. Diner boss Wing-kat (Alan Yeung Wai-lun, suddenly a movie star) is an ex-con with a married girlfriend (Amy Yan Yuk-yu) and a family that has no time for him, especially his father, supremely disappointed Wing-kat didn’t follow his brother Wing-lei’s (Lo Chun-yip) academic footsteps into medicine and wound up a low level gangster. Once he actually did time, he became an even blacker sheep.
Around the corner from Wing-kat’s restaurant is Zoey (real life loudmouth Chung Suet-ying, and keep it up sister), an aspiring actor who works retail to pay the bills. When she misses an audition one evening because an entitled pop star comes into her store after hours, Zoey takes advantage of her friendship with Joey (Ng Wing-sze) to squeeze in… after hours. Joey is assistant to the play’s director Jessie (Kearen Pang Sau-wai), and she pulls a few strings that go well beyond asking for late entry. After her audition Zoey drops into Wing-kat’s place, grabs noodles, gets the wrong order and goes back to get it fixed. Wing-kat refuses because now the kitchen’s closed; it’s after hours. Are you sensing a pattern? Feeling entitled and pissed, she vows revenge, he responds and it’s off to the races.
We Are Born Good lifts several pages from Netflix’s Beef, and though it never quite plumbs that series’ violent depths it does find bitter glee and dark humour in Wing-kat and Zoey’s constant doubling down over what stems from an entirely petty argument; Hongkongers, after all, take their food as seriously as Angelinos take their road rules. The film loses its way a few times on its way to its humanistic conclusion – it relies on every pervert in Hong Kong using the same porn site, for example – but the moral and philosophical questions that power the narrative are both eternal and contemporary. Is lashing out at every little slight the way to conduct ourselves? Is civil society over? Must we always consider what we don’t know about someone else in our daily interactions? All those slowly float to the surface as we get to know Wing-kat and Zoey in between the porn spamming and cockroach bombing (no, seriously, shudder). Wing-kat’s brother actually owns the chachaanteng, his livelihood, in what turns out to be a penance; Zoey’s intense connection with Jessie drives a wedge between her and Joey, and bites her in the ass. Both have proverbial Swords of Damocles hanging over their heads, which the war of attrition only aggravates. It’s all woven together cleverly and set against a modern, funky score by Wong Hin-yan. But it’s Yeung and Chung that make it all work, finding a suitably antagonistic, childish but ultimately empathetic dynamic without tipping into sappy. Wing-kat and Zoey make a kind of peace; it doesn’t make them friends. I’ll admit I’ve never been huge fan of Chung, her millennial apathy serving more sleepy and bored than frustrated ennui, but Yeung (the director) and Yeung (her co-star) pulled a complete performance out of her that suggests she’s ready to move beyond insufferable mugging.