Starring: Jacky Cheung Hok-yau, Tang Wei, Paw Hee-ching Director: Ivy Ho Category: IIA (Cantonese and Putonghua)
While it's no secret the once-gritty Wan Chai made famous by Suzie Wong has undergone extensive changes in recent years, the gooey sweetness flowing down director-writer Ivy Ho's Hennessy Road is at times so cloying that the inhabitants bear as much relationship to reality as Suzie and her cohorts. A gifted writer whose screenplays include the classic Comrades, Almost a Love Story (1996), Ho here displays her customary intelligence and wit but underpinned with a degree of artifice that makes it hard to believe in, let alone care for, the narrative's quirky array of Wan Chai denizens.
Prominent among these is Loy, portrayed with hammy goodwill by Jacky Cheung. Teetering on the edge of caricature, the fortysomething bachelor is so unambitious that his working life is ostensibly under the firm grip of his merry widow-ish mother (Paw Hee-ching), in whose Hennessy Road appliance shop he works. Loy's domestic arrangements are managed by a plain but kindly maiden aunt (Mimi Chu).
Just up the road, a young woman finds herself in a similar predicament. Oi-lin (Tang Wei, above with Cheung) works in her uncle's bathroom-fixture store, where she has earned the admiring nickname 'Toilet Princess'. Like Loy, she appears to be a bit of flotsam on her family's Hennessy tide. That appearances can be deceptive comes to the fore when relatives arrange a matchmaking blind date for Loy and Oi-lin, and the two discover that neither is single.
Loy has recently reunited with a former girlfriend (Maggie Cheung Ho-yee), whose sophistication and ambition are way out of Loy's league. Oi-lin is equally mismatched: her passionate involvement with a hunky but violent jailbird (Andy On Chi-kit) is tenuously developed but provides a welcome dash of grit.
Their stories possess genuine warmth that would have been far better served with a lot less sugar. The opening scene sets the tone literally, with the entire neighbourhood cartoonishly disturbed by Loy's booming symphony of an alarm clock that still fails to get the lackadaisical lad out of bed.
