Art house: The Happenings is a raw look at 1970s Hong Kong

A group of aimless youth on what proves to be the most pivotal night of their lives is showcased in The Happenings (1980), a drama that encapsulates the "New Wave" that swept Hong Kong in the late 1970s and early '80s and injected vitality into the local movie scene.

Director Yim Ho - like fellow Hong Kong New Wave filmmakers Tsui Hark, Ann Hui On-wah and Allen Fong Yuk-ping - had recently returned to Hong Kong from overseas studies (in Yim's case, the London Film School) and had an apprenticeship in television, before making the transition to movies.

Yim's cosmopolitan nature is reflected in The Happenings, a work of cinema that is paradoxically both fresh and derivative.

Within the context of Cantonese pictures, the rawness of the technique and the relative lack of didacticism was a radical departure from the traditional Hong Kong studio product.

Yet when compared to countercultural cinema in the US and Europe during the preceding decade, the misadventures of The Happenings' group of late teens and twenty-somethings often come across as half-baked and naive.

At its best, The Happenings' unapologetic depiction of its protagonists' purposelessness captures an undercurrent of Hong Kong society that is still prevalent today. The saga's half-dozen non-heroes aren't inherently evil, but get swept up in a nightmare scenario that takes on its own momentum.

The first half-hour is breezy enough, a seeming retread of Saturday Night Fever (1977), albeit set in a trendy Hong Kong disco and culminating in a cameo by then teen idol Danny Chan Pak-keung.