Peter Chan’s early films, featuring the two Tony Leungs and Maggie Cheung, were a breath of fresh air in Hong Kong

Peter Chan Ho-sun made a big splash in Hong Kong cinema when he began his career as a director in the early 1990s. His first four films – Alan and Eric: Between Hello and Goodbye; Tom, Dick and Hairy; He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Father; and He’s a Woman, She’s a Man – brought a slick, contemporary approach to Hong Kong light drama.

Well written and neatly structured in the manner of Hollywood films, the films were chock-a-block with Hong Kong references. They were different enough for audiences to find them novel, yet local enough to speak to their everyday concerns.

“The production is infused with a degree of taste usually absent from local filmmaking,” an enthusiastic Post critic said of Alan and Eric in 1991.

Two years later, Post critic Paul Fonoroff noted that Tom, Dick and Hairy provided a breath of fresh air during the last days of the wuxia and kung fu boom of the early 1990s. “This character-driven picture is a refreshing change from the action-oriented costume epics that have flooded cinemas in the last year,” he wrote.

Chan had paid his dues before he began his directing career. Born in Hong Kong, but brought up in Thailand – he is fluent in Thai – Chan moved to the US to attend film school. He returned to Hong Kong for an internship, and never went back to college.

Chan was employed as a Thai/Chinese translator for John Woo Yu-sum, who was shooting Heroes Shed No Tears in Thailand in 1983, and worked his way up to producer, notably with the police action-comedy Curry and Pepper, which featured Stephen Chow Sing-chi before he became famous.

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Chan’s directorial debut, Alan and Eric: Beyond Hello and Goodbye, was something of a surprise. The story features Alan Tam Wing-lun and Eric Tsang Chi-wai as two lifelong friends caught up in a love triangle with Maggie Cheung Man-yuk. Tam, in a crossover with real life, played a future singing star called Alan Tam.

“I’ll never forget stumbling upon Alan and Eric in London’s Chinatown in June 1991,” expert on Asian film Derek Elley, whose writings helped bring Chan to the attention of international viewers, tells the Post. “I knew the actors, of course, but the director’s name was completely new to me, and I was bowled over by the film’s freshness and almost European flavour.

“It’s not a perfect film, and is clearly inspired by Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. The first wave of foreign-trained Hong Kong directors in the late 1970s and early 1980s had already started to bring a stylistic freshness to Hong Kong cinema, but Chan took it to an entirely new level.”

“Even when dealing with very Hong Kong material, his films have an international, almost placeless feel. He also has a technical slickness and great feel for ensemble playing. Even when appearing to go over the top, dramatically or comically, his films generally remain very true emotionally, and that’s not an easy trick to pull off,” says Elley.

Tom, Dick and Hairy (1993), the second production from Chan’s United Filmmakers Organisation, was a yuppie story that revolved around three friends. Tony Leung Ka-fai plays Dick, who can’t settle into a relationship, while Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s Tom has lost his passion for the woman he is planning to marry.

Hairy (Lawrence Cheng Tan-shui), meanwhile, is obsessed by Canto-pop idol Vivian Chow Wai-man, who plays a lookalike of herself in the film. “Several factors make Tom, Dick and Hairy stand out from other yuppie comedies, foremost being the sense of fun from the trio of heroes,” Fonoroff wrote.

The film is a kind of sex comedy which has uninhibited characters who treat sex as a natural part of a relationship, in contrast to the then local fashion for treating it as something crude, shameful or violent.

Even so, lowbrow humour and sexual stereotyping, especially at the expense of gay people, is present, something that Chan has explained away as a necessary inclusion to attract a wider regional audience who enjoyed such jokes.

He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Father, co-directed with Lee Chi-ngai, also features the two Tony Leungs, this time in a time-travel story in which Chiu-wai’s character travels back to the 1950s to meet his father, played by Ka-fai. The visit to the past helps the son appreciate the father that he disdains.

Chan makes good use of a large cast. “He has a great feel for ensemble playing, and the film feels like a homage to old Cantonese ensemble films,” notes Elley.

Nostalgia was the big selling point, and although the film is a fantasy, it reflects many social issues.

“Directors Pete [sic] Chan and Lee … employ the time-travel premise as a departure point from which to shed light on the changing nature of Hong Kong society,” wrote Fonoroff.

He Ain’t Heavy also features Anita Yuen Wing-yee, who had just leapt to stardom in Derek Yee Tung-sing’s smash hit C’est La Vie, Mon Cheri. Yuen had a smaller role in Tom, Dick and Hairy, and put in a star performance in Chan’s He’s a Woman, She’s A Man, and its sequel the following year.

“Anita Yuen was at her hottest in the 1990s, and the four films she made with Chan during this period really made her,” says Elley. “Chan has always been a great director of actresses, and he seems to have responded to Yuen’s Audrey Hepburn-ish, gazelle-like, nervous quality which especially fitted the cross-dressing theme of He’s a Woman.

“At the time, Yuen had an unaffected, natural quality which was very different from the more artificial style of many other Hong Kong actresses.”

He’s a Woman, She’s a Man is the tightest, most complete of the four films. Yuen plays a fan of a singing star, played by Carina Lau Ka-ling, who disguises herself as a boy to meet her idol. Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing plays a record producer who is struggling with his sexual identity.

The film was not only an urban take on the fashion for gender bending in films that followed the success of Tsui Hark’s wuxia Swordsman II, it was a comment on the development the sexual mores of the city.

Chan was surprised when the film became a hit. “I never thought it would do that well because everything was done in a rush,” Chan told the Post’s Winnie Chung in 1995.

“We didn’t even have time to judge or analyse the whole thing before it was released. We were quite nervous about how it would go. But in the end, I think the whole show was quite well paced. There was a good balance between the drama and the comedy, and technically it was better than my previous films,” the director said.

In this regular feature series on the best of Hong Kong cinema, we examine the legacy of classic films, re-evaluate the careers of its greatest stars, and revisit some of the lesser-known aspects of the beloved industry.

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