Starring: Jacky Cheung Hok-yau, Eric Tsang Chi-wai, Anita Yuen Wing-yee Directors: Eric Tsang Chi-wai, Patrick Kong, Chung Shu-kai Category: IIB (Cantonese and Putonghua)
Hong Kong and its motion picture industry have gone through many changes in the 37 years since Shaw Brothers' House of 72 Tenants shattered box-office records and ushered in a new age of Cantonese-language cinema.
By comparison, this latest incarnation offers little to distinguish itself from the superabundance of slapsticks produced in the interim, but is nonetheless to be lauded for keeping alive a once flourishing genre threatened with extinction: the purely local Lunar New Year comedy made with few homogenising concessions to Pan-Chinese taste.
This is both its strength and weakness, for movie-goers unfamiliar with Cantonese television will miss the 'significance' of many gags and fail to recognise the scores of cameos that grace this collaboration between Shaw Brothers Studio and its sister company TVB. Director Tsang Chi-wai has created a pastiche that is less flowing narrative than a collection of sometimes hilarious skits, boiling down the original's premise of 72 neighbours whose lives are connected to two families and their rival electronic firms on Mong Kok's bustling Sai Yeung Choi Street.
It is there that Ha Kung (Tsang) and adversary Shek Kin (Jacky Cheung Hok-yau) compete on both an entrepreneurial and personal level. Not only did they once vie for the same lady (Anita Yuen Wing-yee), but their respective children have gone for the forbidden fruit of romance with enemy progeny. Not that any of this really matters in a film which is at times very funny. The movie begins on a touchingly nostalgic note, a homage to House of 72 Tenants' opening scene via a flashback to the 1970s (though the original was set before the second world war) and the faucet mishap of a Shanghainese laundress (Joyce Cheng Yan-yee reprising the role originated by her mother, Lydia Sum Tin-ha - also known as Lydia Shum).
Otherwise, there's little effort to connect the two 72 Tenants in any meaningful way.