2 - Will Our Time Come? Ann Hui’s Fallen City

Summary

‘We can only hope through long lives / To share her charms across a thousand miles.’

— Su Shi, ‘Prelude to the Water Melody’

Introduction: Not a Simple Life

When Law Kar, veteran Hong Kong film critic, talked about the rise of Hong Kong New Wave cinema in 1979 and the directors associated with it, he cited Tsui Hark and Ann Hui as examples who ‘have continued to play a significant role in its subsequent development’. As arguably the most important wave of young film directors, and one which exerted the most profound impact on Hong Kong cinema, Hong Kong New Wave cinema was soon absorbed into the commercial mainstream system. Not many New Wave directors worked well with mainstream cinema, and in terms of a sustained impact on Hong Kong cinema across four decades after the New Wave, Tsui and Hui were the two most representative among them. However, while the two have continued to be productive up to the present, their styles are significantly diff erent. Unlike Tsui, the ‘Hong Kong Spielberg’, Hui has worked ‘on the edge of mainstream’, focusing more on low- to mid-budget productions. Moreover, she has rarely been involved in the screenwriting of her own works (except for The Romance of Book and Sword [1986], As Time Goes By [1997] and The Postmodern Life of My Aunt [2006]), and she did not begin producing her own works until Ordinary Heroes in 1999. Hui admitted that she is ‘neither a stylist nor a cerebral auteur. She attaches far more importance to creative impulse than to viewer reception and the market.’ Therefore, Hui was considered a ‘quiet, unflashy type’ of ‘jobbing director who takes finished scripts and works one assignment at a time’, and she has been criticised by some ‘as uneven or lacking an easily defined filmmaking style’. It is not inaccurate to describe Hui in this way, and yet she has won more Best Director awards than anyone else in the history of Hong Kong cinema.