Review | G Affairs film review: twisted portrait of contemporary Hong Kong brimming with anger beneath its art-house pretensions
- Completely different from anything Hong Kong cinema traditionally has to offer, G Affairs is a tale of depravity that does not pull its punches
- Its damning assessment of how the city’s authority figures have misplaced their moral compass has echoes of Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong
3.5/5 stars
Less an involving story than it is a plethora of ideas and criticisms delivered with striking art-house pretensions, this brooding feature debut by director Lee Cheuk-pan, executive-produced by the socially conscious veteran Herman Yau Lai-to, deserves to be seen for being so different from anything that Hong Kong cinema traditionally has to offer.
It begins with an enigmatic long take, which shows us a dimly lit room where a teenager plays Bach’s Cello Suite No.1 in G major, a prostitute arrives to have sex with a policeman and, finally, a human head breaks through the window and drops on the floor. The rest of this mystery drama, comprised of fragmented flashbacks and frequent voice-over monologues, explains how we get there.
The protagonist of this tale of depravity, scripted by Beijing-based Hong Kong filmmaker Kurt Chiang Chung-yu, is Yu Ting (Hanna Chan of Paradox ), a cynical top student in a prestige high-school and the daughter of a sensible but terminally ill education consultant (Griselda Yeung Cheuk-na) and an utterly corrupt policeman (Chapman To Man-chat).