FOUR Royal Air Force Wessex helicopters move across the television screen, flying in formation across a sun-drenched Hong Kong skyline. To the accompanying whirr of rotor blades, the music becomes louder. And more spine-chilling. It sounds similar to the score of The Killing Fields. In that film the jerky, discordant and clanking music was used to emphasise the desperate American withdrawal from Cambodia and the ominous arrival of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh. The soundtrack jangles on. The helicopters' rotors thud louder. The sound of the rotors is used to good effect, a tried-and-tested method used to great emotional effect on a multitude of films and images ever since US Marines scrambled off the embassy roof in Saigon.
Then comes a clipped British accent talking, voice-over style, about his fears. 'My guess for the future is that we're dealing with a country that I don't particularly trust,' the voice says. 'I must be careful what I say. They're listening the other side you know and I don't want to be a marked man because they'll take your neck off - in five minutes! They've got their spies here. Everybody knows that. They're not stupid.' The camera roams around the sunny, lazy upper deck of a Star Ferry slowly hauling its way from Hong Kong to Tsim Sha Tsui. The camera focuses on the Chinese passengers. Which one is a spy? The action is broken by the loud ring of the bell. What's that! Has the invasion started? No, sorry to disappoint, viewers. The ferry has just arrived in Kowloon. The British media are, once again, trying to make sense of Hong Kong.
HONG KONG has always been a good stamping ground for Western filmmakers and documentary makers alike. Opium dens, incense, temples and sultry Chinese maidens all combine to make a fine visual feast of the Far East. The British view was tempered more than anything else by the rickshaw-filled streets, the sampan-soaked harbour and Wan Chai girlie bars of The World Of Suzy Wong. Then Roger Moore's 007 came in The Man With The Golden Gun. He also ends up in said girlie bars but is set to return again this year when the new Bond film is shot in Hong Kong.
Whereas in the 1950s world of Suzy Wong, William Holden plays a Western bohemian artist, in 1997, in Wayne Wang's Hong Kong-movie Chinese Box, the male Western lead (Jeremy Irons) is a journalist. Due for release in the autumn, the script is changed according to real-life events. One scene was written around the death of Deng Xiaoping and shot in a real magazine office using real journalists. The makers have said they will include 'real' footage of the handover festivities. Fiction sits with fact. And fact mixes with fiction.
Jonathon Dimbleby is making a fly-on-the-wall documentary inside Goverment House chronicling the life and times of the Pattens since their arrival back in 1992. The result will be intriguing. Apparently thousands of hours of footage are already in the can. The mainland's The Opium Wars, due for a symbolic release on July 1, promises to be a lavish piece of docu-drama acting out the history of British crimes in Hong Kong and China. Dimbleby's The Last Governor should be the last word in British propaganda, The Opium Wars is the first word in new Chinese propaganda.
By then, of course, Britain may have had a belly-full of coverage. The BBC itself plans to bring 182 staff to cover the handover celebrations and - at least for the day - have promised viewers at home 'wall-to-wall', 24-hour coverage. Already hours of television and acres of news print have been devoted over the last few months to Britain's 'last colony'.
