My Take | Ten Years can be tedious but its theme about Hong Kong’s paranoia is not far off the mark
Things will only get worse before they get better; for that, the controversial, award-winning movie may even prove to be prescient
Movies with an overt political message that smack you in head to make sure you “get it” are typically tedious. To this end, Ten Years does not disappoint. Practically every scene is a display of some Hongkongers’ paranoid anti-mainland sentiment, from a taxi driver being forced to speak Putonghua to a store owner berated by children for advertising his eggs as “local”.
It’s not really a movie with a clear narrative but a series of vignettes about what life would be like in 10 years as imagined by localists and separatists. It suffers from the humourless literalism of the unartistic.
But, despite all that, it fully deserves winning the top prize at the Hong Kong Film Awards. It’s a perfect product of our time, capturing many people’s anxieties and fears about creeping mainland dominance, whether real or imagined.
It is, therefore, by definition, a serious movie. None of the other competing movies remotely approach Ten Years’ social relevance and political importance at this time.
So, it’s been a bit like watching the theatre of the absurd when so many of the industry’s great and good come out to denounce the film winning the award.