Review | The Sunny Side of the Street movie review: Anthony Wong, Sahal Zaman represent refugees from different eras in intriguing Hong Kong drama
- Director Lau Kok-rui’s first feature film follows a Hong Kong taxi driver (Anthony Wong) and the Hong Kong-born son (Sahal Zaman) of a Pakistani refugee
- The film is absorbing, if somewhat contrived, and feels like a vehicle tailored to show Wong’s acting talent rather than address an issue meaningfully
3/5 stars
A series of misfortunes that befall a South Asian refugee family provides the unlikely backdrop for an actorly exercise for Anthony Wong Chau-sang in The Sunny Side of the Street. The film is the absorbing, if somewhat contrived, first feature of Hong Kong-based Malaysian writer-director Lau Kok-rui.
Wong stars as Yat, a taxi driver who illegally immigrated to Hong Kong from mainland China in the 1970s by swimming – and lost his wife to the sea in the process. Yat’s estranged son Hong (Endy Chow Kwok-yin), now a policeman, remains bitter about having had to live his entire childhood back in China without his parents.
The second, Urdu-language storyline comes into focus when Yat, on his way to Hong’s wedding banquet, runs his taxi into the side of a van driven by Ahmed (Inderjeet Singh) – a Pakistani asylum seeker who has long struggled to provide for his wife (Kiranjeet Gill) and 10-year-old, Hong Kong-born son, Hassan (Sahal Zaman).
More coincidences, some improper law enforcement by Hong’s police colleague Wai (Fire Lee Ka-wing) and one ridiculously pointless car chase later, and Ahmed is killed in a road accident that is directly caused by Yat.
It is at this midway point that Hassan, a habitual thief, begins to fall very far on the wrong side of the law. Yat, suddenly repentant, decides to help the boy by smuggling him out of Hong Kong. This feels like a bizarre change of heart and a plot twist designed to let Wong show his acting chops.