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Review
by Kozo: |
Screen
newcomer Pu Pu is Pu Pu, a young Chinese woman who's just
been dumped by her boyfriend. Unfortunately for Pu Pu, she
was totally enraptured with her fella, and as such encounters
heartbreak with a decidedly sullen attitude. To ease her pain,
she hightails to Hong Kong to visit her sister, who runs a
fish store with her husband. While helping around the store,
Pu Pu begins searching desperately for a certain song from
Taiwanese singer Jay Chou. The song was the official anthem
of Pu Pu and her ex, but finding the song is more difficult
than she expects. She learns from Yu (Shawn Yue), a proprietor
of a used CD store, that the song was a hidden track on the
first 500 CDs of a particular Jay Chou album. Ergo, it's not
that easy to come by.
Luckily Yu owns a copy of the
CD. Unluckily, he lent it out to new age guru (Eason Chan),
who practices extreme yoga and hangs out in oxygen bars. Pu
Pu attempts to get the CD from him, but he doesn't have it
either. She continues to look for the CD, but each stop leads
her to a new eccentric personality, including another used
CD salesman (David Wu) who never uses the same name twice,
a female taxi driver (Denise Ho), and a weirder-than-weird
cop (Daniel Wu) who loves his mom a little too much. Each
stop also allows for Pu Pu to find new facets and potential
partners in love, the result of which could bring her closer
to both the physical and metaphorical representation of the
Jay Chou hidden track.
Confused? Don't be. While the
film's plot highlights Pu Pu's quest for the hidden Jay Chou
track (the film's Chinese title is literally translated as
Finding Jay Chou), she's really looking for something else:
love. Even more, she's looking for that which love will bring
in hopeful untold amounts: happiness. Yes, it's every lovelorn
Gen-X girl's dream, the attainment of the idealized love,
which is just as rare and hard to find as the hidden track
on a limited edition pressing of a Jay Chou CD. The double
meanings of the plot are both obvious and thoughtful. Someone
went to great efforts to insure that Hidden Track was
more than just a "girl loses boy and finds new one"
tale. It's a film rife with quirky characters, situations,
and even some badly-animated CG—all of which is supposed
to illuminate the existential quest for happiness and true
love. At this point, the audience should be A) enchanted by
the densely metaphorical narrative, or B) put off that the
film seems more interested in its own cleverness than actually
making much sense.
Hidden Track comes from
the pen and lens of Aubrey Lam. Long one of HK's more thoughtful
screenwriters, Lam made her mark co-writing films from the
United Filmmakers Organization (UFO, for the initiated) before
directing her first feature, Twelve Nights, in 2000.
A thorough examination of twelve nights in a soon-to-fail
relationship, Twelve Nights possessed a fine eye for
detail, but was also unengaging and even depressingly pessimistic. Hidden Track goes the opposite route, and is instead
a breezy, quirky and enchantingly positive film on losing
and finding love, and the strange connections we make in that
search.
Still, both Aubrey Lam's films do
share one common connection: they're both distractingly self-conscious
of their artistic aims. Hidden Track features all sorts
of minor details and incidents which are meant to represent
heartbreak and the search for love. Pu Pu's quest for the
hidden track is one, but then there's the case of Yu. Besides
running his own used CD shop, Yu is despondent over the loss
of his dog, an affection he attempts to transfer to a turtle,
plant and—one would hope—another person one day.
Yu, like Pu Pu, can't be happy because he's not whole. He
needs that other part of himself, which is obviously some
other creature that he can love and care for. Pu Pu needs
a true love to hold her and console her. And Jay Chou, in
a ballyhooed and somewhat bizarre cameo, needs something to
make his taste buds enjoy sweet foods once more. Hidden
Track could have gone directly to its subject matter,
but it chooses to take a circuitous route that attempts meaning
through metaphor, a narrative tactic which is both obvious
and a little off-putting.
Not that everything is bad.
On the contrary, Hidden Track has enough good parts
to make it a worthy little flick, though as a whole the film
probably shouldn't be called successful or even good. Some
of the minor vignettes are funny and telling, and the actors
turn in charming performances. Pu Pu has a new, refreshing
screen presence, and Shawn Yue is amusingly dopey as the weird,
but still lovable Yu. Aubrey Lam gives the film a breezy,
whimsical vibe which doesn't exactly make the film cohere,
but manages to make it entertaining and even endearing. Lam
is certainly a charming stylist, but she probably needs to
study the nuts and bolts of storytelling more closely. By
making the film a somewhat-connected series of quirky encounters,
she neglects to bring actual development to what finally happens
to Pu Pu and Yu. The ending itself is neither unwelcome or
unexpected, but it ultimately isn't earned. It might put a
smile on your face, as indeed many parts of the film could
do. Overall, though, it doesn't quite add up. (Kozo 2004) |
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