MR. COCONUT
With Hui, Wong, Olivia Cheng, Ricky Hui, Maria Cordero, and Joi Wong.
With Leung, John Sham, Yong Lin, Yia Ho, King Shin Chien, and Chan Koon Cheung.
For me, this is both the advantage and the drawback of Hong Kong cinema; certainly that dynamism has a lot to do with the ways that it’s been celebrated by a handful of Anglo-American critics. The fact that it’s truly a popular cinema made for a regular-attendance audience–the kind of cinema we used to have in the United States before the old studio system fell apart and event-oriented attendance and video rentals took over–seems to make it, for many English and American enthusiasts, a return to childhood innocence and a certain antiintellectual simplicity. Scharres’s current Hong Kong series at the Film Center, like her other efforts to make Chinese movies better known here, is considerably more comprehensive than this description implies. But the delirious title of her series–“Incredibly Hong Kong!,” which sounds like it could have been dreamed up by Bill and Ted–still points in this general direction, and something in me resists this sort of appeal.
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When Tsui Hark was first recommended to me as the Chinese Spielberg (around the time of his Peking Opera Blues), that was enough in itself to cool my interest. Subsequent looks at his highly skilled work, which seemed to confirm this comparison, were further turnoffs, especially since in my opinion world cinema already has at least one Steven Spielberg too many. I was also less than enthralled by John Woo’s A Bullet in the Head, praised to the skies by many critics I respect, because American movies already inundate us with baroque exercises in extreme violence and dumb-ass male prerogatives. (Hong Kong critic Stephen Teo has suggested, in “The Legacy of T.E. Lawrence: The Forward Policy of Western Film Critics in the Far East,” that the spectacle of Western critics enthusing over John Woo movies would be roughly comparable to Asian experts on Anglo-American cinema flipping over Michael Winner’s Death Wish movies.)
King of Chess and Mr. Coconut are especially interesting to me because they deal with the very topical subject of the relation of Hong Kong to mainland China (the “absorption” of Hong Kong into the mainland being scheduled for 1997). Each movie dramatizes in a very different way the social, moral, and aesthetic tensions between the two cultures, and neither seeks to make this conflict into a simple one, with right on one side and wrong on the other; in fact both seek a soulful bonding between the best of what is Chinese in both cultures.
Mr. Coconut disrupts the family largely through his spitting, his smoking, and his eating habits. (He prefers a portable spittoon to the toilet, is the only smoker in the household, and pigs out at every meal.) Significantly, it’s mainly his brother-in-law, the bourgeois butt of most of the gags, who is driven up the wall by these and other personal habits; the other family members tend to be more tolerant.
