Preview: Till They Enthrall Themselves

Best-selling author and HK Magazine’s very own columnist Chip Tsao’s directorial debut “Enthralled” is inevitably tinged with the political. Heavy on the melodrama, allegory and mega-twists, the film is a metaphorical soap opera about the Hong Kong experience.  

 

Three elementary school friends are separated following the post-Tiananmen wave of emigration. Although they lead disparate lives, they meet again 20 years later, back in Hong Kong. One has since immigrated to the UK and returned as a successful banker and womanizer. The most solipsistic of the three is immune to the attempts of his Uyghur exchange student to draw him out of his shell, becoming obsessed instead with his late estranged father, who killed himself after murdering a fellow cop. The last friend is an opportunistic social climber hairstylist-cum-gigolo with a secret double life. Of course, it all crescendos to multiple deaths. It’s a melodrama of epic proportions, bordering on the absurd.