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Paul Fonoroff

Starring: Eason Chan Yik-shun,  Wen Junhui,   Gia Lin Yuan
Director: Derek Kwok Chi-kin
Category: IIA (Cantonese)
Bleak yet saccharine, this portrait of two outcasts gets so caught up in the wonder of its concept  it never  makes its pariahs believable or affecting. The debut of director-writer Derek Kwok is earnest and heartfelt but lacks the discernment  needed to bring it to life.
The  story (co-authored by Long Man-hong)  is full of challenges, not  least of which is creating a persuasive tale of a child and an adult, both lonely souls without many family or friends, who forge a life-changing bond. The narrative is further complicated by placing the  relationship within the context of a criminal vendetta. That the two strains are weakly integrated adds to the movie's implausibility.
The major hurdle is the film's inability to make convincing characters out of protagonists Dui (Eason Chan), a low-ranking assistant to a small-time gang boss (Eric Tsang Chi-wai),  and Wang (Wen Junhui, right), a student whose miserable life has led him to never speak. This doesn't  mean he keeps silent, for we are privy to his thoughts via voice-over narration that precociously elucidates story developments.
A central but  flimsy plot is Dui's 'undercover' job as a school janitor whose mission is to track down and abduct the son of a rival mobster. The setting  provides a plausible rationale for one of the movie's most effective passages, a class field trip involving Wang, Dui, and Putonghua teacher Miss Cheung (Gia Lin Yuan). When Wang gets lost in a forest, the janitor and the  teacher conduct an overnight search that jettisons the multiple sub-texts and gives the characters a chance to simply interact. A nice touch is the  visualisation of the scared  child's imagination running wild in the spooky environment.  But there's too much reliance on narration and a perky music  score  to tell us how to react.  Overuse of these devices accentuates their artificiality, particularly in the last half when the gangster story comes to the fore, along with an out-of-left-field plot revelation the scriptwriters never logically reconcile.
Not that logic is a strong point of The Pye-Dog. The film chooses to ignore any inconveniences caused by its own contrivances. An example is the death of Wang's guardian, his gruff but caring grandma (Susan Shaw Yin-yin).  Her demise is wrung for tears, but the  implications of how this loss would affect a minor are barely dealt with.
The pervasive treacle congeals during the school's climactic Christmas concert, when a hitman (Cheung Kwok-keung)  positions himself for an ambush as the  mute boy gets on stage to sing You Light Up My Life. As if this weren't sugary enough, his voice is drowned out by a Debbie Boone sound-alike (Jasmine Pang)  and a montage in which the chorus is joined by Wang's deceased granny, renegade father (George Lam Chi-cheung)  and others. Excessive sentimentality  hinders   efforts to get the audience to care about  the film's underdogs.
The Pye-Dog opens today



The Pye-Dog