Madalena movie review: Louis Cheung, Chrissie Chau play working-class lovers in quietly melancholic Macau-set romance drama

3/5 stars

Two traumatised adults find solace in each other’s company in this romantic two-hander written and directed by Emily Chan Nga-lei (Our Seventeen), who juxtaposes her working-class protagonists’ sorrows against Macau’s materialism with largely predictable, though no less heart-rending results.

Madalena sees two familiar Hong Kong actors given rare naturalistic turns as the leads in a nocturnal drama. The story begins in 2008 with Louis Cheung Kai-chung playing Mada, a desperately lonely man who works the graveyard shift as a taxi driver and spends the rest of his days drunk, after his unfaithful Chinese wife walked out three years earlier.

Meanwhile, Chrissie Chau Sau-na is Lena, a mainland Chinese immigrant of eight years who works as a restaurant hostess by day and a beer girl – illegally – by night. Always ready to suffer for more tips, even if it means downing every drink her difficult customers offer her, the 30-year-old is eager to save up just enough before packing up for her mother and young daughter back home.

Once they cross paths, the two swiftly become close and Mada – who turns out also to be a mainland immigrant, albeit one already with a Macau ID – begins to drive Lena to work every day. They enter a relationship, but soon their delicate romance gives way to banal conflicts as Lena struggles to keep her troubled past, involving gangsters, a secret from Mada.

Macau’s gambling business and temporary resident base have fuelled the imaginations of filmmakers looking to apply a melancholic sheen to their stories of longing and regret, as local director Tracy Choi Ian-sin did with 2017’s Sisterhood and Chinese filmmaker Li Shaohong did with 2019’s A City Called Macau – both, incidentally, featuring Hong Kong talent.

By contrast, Fujian, China-born, Macau-based Chan’s Madalena mostly avoids the glitzy side of the city to focus on its grass-roots characters’ past relationship troubles. Cheung and Chau are curious choices to play Chinese immigrants – neither even pretends to speak accented Cantonese – but lovers of Hong Kong cinema should not complain at the opportunity to see the two take on such meaty dramatic roles.

It is always nice to see the prolific Cheung step back from his wisecracking comedic sidekick persona to bare his soul for a role. The same applies to Chau; the former swimsuit model reminds us here – as she did in 29+1 (2017) – that she is a perfectly capable actress who deserves more proper projects in which to show off her acting chops.

If it does little else, Madalena indeed offers them both exactly such opportunity.

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