Art house: 1988’s Gangs started a mini-wave of neo-realist youth films

THE REACTION OF OPENING NIGHT audiences is rarely an accurate gauge of a picture’s worth, particularly star-laden blockbusters with a notoriously partisan following. But this was hardly the case with the 1988 premiere of Gangs, a neo-realist work with a cast of newcomers that marked the feature debut of director Lawrence Lau Kwok-cheung.

As the lights came on in the Ko Shan Theatre, then a screening venue for the Hong Kong International Film Festival, there was palpable excitement among the movie-goers, the enthusiasm of their questions containing an ebullience that I’ve rarely encountered over the course of 30 years of film debuts.

The reason behind the exuberance wasn’t due to the novelty of the subject matter, for Hong Kong celluloid had long been home to teenage rebels with and without causes, most famously the teenage Bruce Lee’s stellar turn in The Orphan (1960). Rather, the audience was responding to the honesty and seeming artlessness that permeated Gangs.

Chan Man-keung’s script was based on real people, with many of the first-time actors inhabiting roles modelled after their own experiences. The crux of the narrative was the doomed path taken by two teen brothers (Ricky Ho Pui-tung and Wong Chung-chun) and their marginalised chums, a group whose ugly “new town” environment and the indifference of society had steered them towards a life in Hong Kong’s triad twilight.

It was territory not dissimilar to that traversed, albeit with a female focus, six years earlier in the groundbreaking Lonely Fifteen (1982). Though rightfully lauded for its gritty authenticity, Lonely Fifteen fell into the pitfalls of melodrama and exploitation that had marred its earlier genre counterparts. Not so Gangs, in which the stark technique reflected the production’s unvarnished fidelity to the themes.

Most refreshing was the director’s faith in his audience to come to conclusions without the sermonising that infected The Orphan.