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How Pang Ho-cheung’s early black comedies disrupted Hong Kong cinema
The writer-director’s You Shoot, I Shoot (2001) and Men Suddenly in Black (2003) injected a dose of dark satire into a waning local industry
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Before he became a film festival darling with Isabella (2006) and defined a generation’s romantic cynicism with Love in a Puff (2010), writer-director Pang Ho-cheung was a published novelist injecting a much-needed dose of dark satire into a flagging Hong Kong film industry in the early 2000s.
Emerging in an era when producers largely demanded formulaic dollops of action, melodramatic romance or sex, Pang’s first two directorial efforts cut through the commercial noise, signalling the arrival of a distinctly irreverent mind.
To satisfy these commercial constraints without sacrificing his satirical voice, the first-time director set his witty and original black comedy You Shoot, I Shoot in the world of a hitman – a high-stakes scenario that guaranteed the required action elements while effortlessly securing financial backing.
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The result was the second funniest comedy of 2001 – Stephen Chow Sing-chi’s Shaolin Soccer was number one – and one of the best comic outings of the entire decade.
“Forget about such bloated summer films as Para Para Sakura, The Legend of Zu, Love on a Diet and Fulltime Killer,” wrote South China Morning Post critic Paul Fonoroff that year. “A low-budget black comedy, shot on a shoestring budget, has beaten them all for freshness and originality. You Shoot, I Shoot ranks close to Shaolin Soccer as the season’s most entertaining picture.”
An impressive debut
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