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Lee Wing-Sze

If you are going to see scriptwriter-director Aubrey Lam Oi-wah's new movie, Hidden Track, expecting it to be all sweet romance, you won't be disappointed - there is enough kissing and cuddling to satisfy even the most ardent romantic.

But for Lam, the film, which opens today, is not just a love story.

'What I've tried to show is the loneliness and helplessness of life,' says Lam, whose debut movie Twelve Nights, starring Cecelia Cheung Pak-chi and Eason Chan Yik-sun, was released three years ago.

The cast for the new movie includes young mainland actress Po Po, pop stars Shawn Yu Man-lok, Daniel Wu Yin-cho and Denise Ho Wan-sze. Taiwanese singer Jay Chou makes his debut movie appearance in the production.

The story follows the journey of Po Po (played by Po Po herself), a girl from Wuhan, who comes to Hong Kong in search of a Jay Chou CD which features an imaginary bonus track that she first listened to with her ex-boyfriend. Through her journey, she meets people who have different values about love and who introduce her to different music, such as new age, jazz and alternative.

'As she keeps searching for Jay's CD, she forgets what she is really searching for,' Lam says.

'It's like life. We keep searching for our ideals, but sometimes we just forget what we are looking for.'

The director says she was inspired to write the script by American author Carol Rosen's Maybe He's Just A Jerk and Italian writer Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller.

'My original idea was to make a movie about different types of bad men, but it didn't sound interesting and it was not commercial enough,' she says. 'Then I decided to use music to reflect different attitudes towards love and adopted the narrative idea of If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, which is about a person searching for a book.'

The director, who started her film-making career as a scriptwriter at the former United Film-makers Organisation (UFO), draws inspiration from books, music and visual arts.

'You'll usually produce something similar when getting your inspiration from watching movies,' she says.

'It is even more interesting to adopt the narrative approach of other forms of media in movies.'

After she graduated from the University of Hong Kong in 1990 with a political science degree, Lam, aspiring to be a filmmaker, headed to the United States to study for a master's degree in film production.

Running out of money, she did not complete the course and had to return to Hong Kong in 1994. She then took a course at the Hong Kong Film Academy and joined UFO. However, after UFO shut down in 1999, she turned her hand to freelance scriptwriting.

'I didn't realise that the business was so tough until UFO closed,' she recalls.

'It was a really difficult time for me. I'd never needed to worry about whether anyone would invest when I worked for UFO,' says Lam, adding that she wrote about five versions of her script before the shooting of Twelve Nights could begin.

'I didn't know that by being a director one had to consider why people would or would not invest in your films.'

Although her path to being director has not been smooth, she is glad and grateful to have completed two movies.

Lam says her next movie will be set in the local music industry  and take a detailed look at Hong Kong society.

Look in tomorrow's Young Post for a poster of Jay Chou.



Not all sugar and spice