Film studies: remade in Korea
It was hailed as a classic of contemporary Hong Kong cinema and some of its scenes have spawned countless screen homages and parodies. Now, nearly two decades after its release, A Moment of Romance is finally receiving the remake treatment - in South Korea.
A new version of Benny Chan Muk-shing's 1990 film, which stars Andy Lau Tak-wah as the disaffected hoodlum Wah Dee and Jacqueline Wu Chien-lien as his rich-girl love interest Jojo, will begin production in December, with the story now set on the Korean resort island of Cheju and reworked to accommodate its burgeoning gambling industry. The small-scale vendetta between Wah Dee and his underworld mentor - who wants him killed for freeing Jojo after his gang kidnapped her - gives way to an epic plot depicting a power struggle between Korean, Japanese and Chinese gangs over the island's casinos.
'I remember vividly the scene in which Wah Dee, with blood dripping down his face, gets on his bike to whisk Jojo away from danger,' says Kim Jong-jin, who will preside over the remake. The 34-year-old director was just 15 when he first saw the film and it left a lasting impression on him.
Kim says he belongs to a generation of young Korean filmmakers whose formative years were largely shaped by Hong Kong films, which he says were the hip pictures to watch in the early 90s. 'It wasn't Hollywood films that captivated us back then - it was Hong Kong movies,' he said last week on a visit of the city for his upcoming project. 'A Moment of Romance and A Better Tomorrow were the two films which Koreans wanted to watch.'
The way these Hong Kong gangster flicks laced sweeping melodrama with odd dashes of tragicomedy contributed a lot to the tone of many Korean films in the 1990s, Kim says, adding that traditional film education until then had revolved around European and US cinema. 'We watched a lot of those films in school,' says Kim, who studied film at the Chung-ang University in Seoul. 'But Hong Kong films allowed us to understand how films could work in a commercial sense. And these are the films which portray how east [Asian] people live; it influenced how Korean cinema developed.'
The Korean remake of A Moment of Romance was partly born out of the efforts of Hong Kong film producers: the film is financed by Hong Kong-based Dreamchild Entertainment, which runs a sister company in Seoul.