Mimosas (含羞草)

Mimosas(含羞草) is my first film at this year's HKIFF. It started off very well and leaves me in great hopes of more films of a similar calibre in the coming days.

In many ways, it's a most unusual film. Certainly not one which one can expect to become an instant box office miracle. But it exudes a magical charm for me. The moment the film starts, I am already drawn in. I see several people, two mules, some women, two male porters. They came to the top of a hill. As far as the eyes can see, one finds mountains and mountains the top of which is covered in snow and above the mountains, nothing but skies. They stop. Some insist on going on. Some express doubt. The old sheik who knows that his days are numbered wants to go to a small  Morrocan town called Sijilmasa, at the foot of Mount Atlas in North Africa, where he expects to be buried at the side of his forefathers. But they got a problem, they do not know the way. Neither does the guide. A discussion follows. But the old sheik is convinced that if there's a will, there's a way and that they should put their faith in Allah. They continue.

Eperdument (Down by Love) (狂愛)

It is often said that love is blind. Philosophers like Plato taught that love is a noble virtue, a kind of non-sexual relationship between heterosexual friends, an arête and that we must distinguish between eros and philia. Believers in the monotheistic god tell us that love or agape has its origin in that greatest source of everything in the universe, that fountain of that Greatest Love that can possibly exist, called variously God, Allah, Yahweh. Moralists tell us that love is the kind of unselfish human kindness, compassion, and affection, loyalty and benevolent concern of one human being for another. Yet, biologist tell us that love is merely the kind of physiological reaction felt by human being, like other animals when he/she is ready to mate and for that purpose to copulate. If so, is love equivalent to love-making?  Can love be reduced to mere animal passion, without sense, difficult if not impossible to control by our reason which Aristotle and countless other philosophers tell us is something which distinguishes a man from an animal? Who is right? Who is wrong? Can we even sensibly discuss the question at all? Is it a meaningful question in the first place? If it's a meaningful question, what do we mean by "meaningful"? Do we know what we are talking about when we think or say that we are talking about "love"?

Mobile étoile (Night Song) (夜之聲).

December 9 is a very special day for me. That afternoon whilst 689 was forced by Beijing to announce that owing to reasons of facing up to his "responsibility" to his family, he would not seek re-election as HK's CE, I was involved in a totally different world. I believe that for most people in HK, splintered and radicalized into seemingly irreconciable political factions by the antics of our CE, that's a very pleasing shock indeed. But at the same time as the shock waves of that announcement was still settling, another minor shock was being unfolded at the HK Film Archive in Sai Wan Ho, as the screen  rolled out images after images of another world: the world of preservation of 19th and early 20th century French Jewish music through the indefatigable work of certain musicians in Quebec, Canada.  That is the subject of a most unusual film directed by Raphaël Nadjari  and co-written by him and Vincent Poymiro called Mobile étoile (Night Song)(夜之聲).

The film is about the finnancial, personal and intra-group struggles of a small group of very dedicated choral French-Portuguese Jewish religious music aficiandos spear-headed by the Dussault family, whose three members were respectively the singer-conductress of a small choral group,Hannah Hermann (Géraldine Pailhas), her pianist husband Daniel Dussault (Luc Picard ) and their teenage violinist son David Hermann-Dussault (Alexandre Sheasby)  When the film began, they were preparing for the group's last concert by their existing members which also included Etha Salomons (Felicia Shulman ) and Liliane Levy (Dorothée Berryman), the last of whom who would retire after having been with the group since its beginning. After her retirement, the group advertised for a new member and was soon joined by the very talented young Abigail Colin (Eléonore Lagacé). We're shown how when the couple went back to the their studio one morning, they found that the lock had been changed. Daniel went to the manager Marlus's (Raymond Cloutier) office and found that that was because they hadn't paid the rent for 3 months despite numerous reminders. Daniel was forced to make out a personal cheque and was allowed by the director to continue their rehearsals there.
  
Everything began to change when Hannah's teenage professor Samuel Badazs (Paul Kunigis)  brought them a rare manuscript of the original of a beautiful song, the title of the film, which he took great pains to trace back to an archive of Portuguese Jewish synagogue music in Bordeaux and had it restored by an expert. It was a song with special meaning to Hannah and her ex-professor. When they were rehearsing it with a new interpretation with a more romantic feel suggested by Abigail, they invited Badazs to give his comments. Badazs was not at all in agreement and insisted that it ought to be done in a more formal manner because it was religious music. Daniel had to rewrite the accompaniment to second movement of the song.But when they were invited by the head of the classical music section of the radio station in Quebec to have it recorded after they listened one of their concerts, Daniel refused to be the pianist and Hannah had to double up both as singer and pianist because it was not at all his idea of how it should be done. To him, an artist should be left free to add his own personality to the music according to what he feels to be contemporary sentiments to make it relevant. But Hannah insisted that it should be done the way her former professor said.

The plot was made slightly more interesting by the antics of Marlus who enjoyed listening to their rehearsals and was found doing so by accident by Daniel, who mistakenly thought he was snooping around on them but when the misunderstanding was cleared up, he was invited to join the group as a baritone, something he accepted after some initial hesitation and helped actively in making a presentation of some more lively music to a school in an effort to popularize their genre of classical French Jewish religious music but failed to win over the school authorities.. But they persisted and in the end won a continuation of their grant from the musical foundation which hitherto was supporting them as a result of their radio performance.

It's a simple enough story about how music was what united the Dussault family, whose oldest member Jean-Paul Dussault (Marcel Sabourin) suffered a stroke but when he was rejoined by his son, who played a Bach piece which he taught him when his son was still a child, at the old people's retreat, his spirits revived.  I like the way the director and cinematographer constantly focuses the camera upon the character's eyes through which a kind of mutual attention to each other in a tacit understanding that flowed along with the mood of the music, something really beautiful to see. We also see how the love of music pervaded soul of the Dussault family and helped  transform and mould it into a living unity, despite the gender, despite age,and differences of personality and preferences and how their common love of music help keep them together despite divergent views of how it should "properly" be done and how if someone were kept out of the rather personal project of its conductress, the only other non-family member Etha felt "betrayed"..   

It's a most unusual film, definitely not one which has universal appeal to everyone. But to a music lover, its music is truly heavenly. The film was made credible almost entirely through the very sensitive acting of all its main characters. But of course, what made the film a delight to watch was it incredibly well recorded music.
 

Vendeur (Who's Your Daddy?) (我阿爸是誰?)

The life of a top notch salesman is full of self-confidence, a giant size ego, money, constant pressure to clinch the deal, the kind of conspicuous glamor and other things that money can buy like well tailored suit, powerful and well-built BMW But it can also be a life of loneliness which can only be drowned by one glass after another of alcohol, one prostitute after another in hotel rooms, "professional" pep talk sessions utilizing the results of social psychology in the form of the so-called "positive psychology" , organized by the boss of the relevant business organization and even hard drugs. The aim of all salesmanship is to conclude a deal with maximum profit whatever it is that one is selling. The salesman must make use of all his personal charm, his gift of the gab, his insight into the human weakness of greed, of their fear of losing out on something too good to be true, of the inclination of ordinary mortals to dream moments of glory otherwise missing in their lives(more realistically, of vainglory), to be the focus of envy amongst their peersand their reckless, their unwillingness to do the needed hard work of weighing carefully the long and short term benefits against the relevant downside factors, to squeeze the last dollar from his customers, for which he may be offered loans at "fantastically" easy to accept initial terms, offers that can't possibly be refused. The trick is first to create the desire in the customer by emphasizing the beauty, the utility, the ease of the product, to elicit the customer's imagination of an ideal future state, then create what "appears" a difficulty, eg. by listing a much higher price than the what the seller is ultimately prepared to accept, then give the customer the illusion that he is being "clever" or "smart" or "skilful" in negotiating down the price by a very "substantial" amount by offering first a little concession, then a little bit more until the parties are very close to a deal and when there are signs that the customer may be showing firm signs of walking away, then make a final "once only" or :"once in a lifetime" "final" concession saying that that  incredible offer may be withdrawn if the customers doesn't accept within an extremely brief period, that the "ultimate best offer' will be withdrawn. The trick is to force the customer into making a quick "on the spot" decision without being given the opportunity of thinking things through. When all the tricks of the trade are used in a timely fashion, a deal may result.  Here the born salesman will have a knack of when to do what and his sense of timing must be perfect, something which cannot be learned if one doesn't really have a gift for that kind of instantaneous insight.

La Fille Inconnue (The Unknown Girl) (無名少女)

A young lady doctor Jenny Davin (Adèle Haenel ) and another young man Julien (Olivier Bonnaud) both in doctors's robe, were jointly examining the huge puffy back of an old man (Andre Gotti) with stethocscope, giving the him directions to breathe at various intervals. The young Juilen gave his diagnosis. Dr. Davin asked Juilen to listen to another part of the man's back. He did so. She did the same. At the end, she told the young man that the patient had two symptoms of two respiratory and lung condition, not one. The young man didn't say anything. But it was obvious that he felt rebuffed. Then the examination was interrupted by a cry from the lady doctor's nurse that someone was dying. The lady doctor apologises to his patient that she had to attend to someone else first. he said it was OK. She rushed up the stairs and found an Arabian boy writhing. trembling and shaking involuntarily, in a cramp, frothing at the mouth. She pressed him down, held his head and ordered the sulking young man to bring her a pillow. The young man, then leaning against the wall just three feet away remained immobile. She had to do so herself. After the boy suffering from epilepsy was treated, she told him that to be a professional, one must control one's feelings at all times if one were not to make a wrong diagnosis. During her little lecture, someone sounded the doorbell to her clinic. She switched on the CCTV screen. She saw the image of a young black colored girl pressing the doorbell repeatedly, anxiety all over her face. She had never seen this girl before as a patient. She looked at the clock. It was already past 5.30 p.m., the closing hour of her clinic.The young man made as if he wanted to go down to open the door. She told him it was past the closing hour. Without another word, the young man took his bike and carried it towards the exit. She let him go. The young man did not turn up again the following day. She telephoned the young man and left a voice message apologizing for the harsh way she spoke to him and asked him to call her back. He never did.

The Together Project (L'Effet aquatique) (求愛水計劃)

The Together Project (L'Effet aquatique)  is my first film in the just started French Film Festival 2016 HK. Directed and co-written by Sólveig Anspach and Jean-Luc Gaget and starring Samir Guesmi  (as Samir) and Florence Loiret  Caille ( as Agathe), Didda Jónsdóttir ( as Anna) and Philippe Rebbot ( as  Reboute), it's a very French swimming pool romance set in motion first by pure chance and then continued through some heavily engineered calculation attributable to those huge jokes beloved by men and women perpetrated by Nature on terrestrials through a combination testoterones, estrogens and dopamine.

Dia dokutâ (Dear Doctor)(親愛的醫生)

Dia dokutâ (Dear Doctor)(親愛的醫生) (2009) is a uniquely postmodernist Japanese film based upon a novel by Miwa Nishikawa (西川美和) and adapted for the screen and directed by herself. To me, everything in that film is marked by a blurring of boundaries, starting from the very title of the film, which looks like a Japanese transliteration of an emotive English term coupled with a Western professional title, an obvious juxtapositioning of two completely different cultures, extending to the mixing of genre of novel and film, the grafting of mid-West American country music on to a most Japanese countryside, the contrast between modern and the traditional Japanese cultures, the interface of Western medical instruments, pills, surgery with a silver bullet approach to health problem with a very Eastern concept of healing of the person rather his/her illness, the application of a very new Western criminal investigative technique into the story of the disappearance of a "doctor" much loved and adored by the senile inhabitants of a very traditional small Japanese village, the conflict between the head and the heart, between truth and falsehood, between reality and illusion or delusion. There is also a very postmodern collapsing of the 4 dimensional world into two, just surface area: the past and the future collapsing into the living present, the here and now, which seems the only spot where time has got any meaning at all and nothing remains but the spectacle of social roles, a world in which each plays out his individual part and the world has become one in which there can no longer be any modernist truths which are valid at all times, for all people, under all kinds of culture and the only "truths" permissible are local truths valid only for particular persons, particular places at a specific point in the traditional "historical" time, one in which feeling and humanity still reign supreme. Yet all these apparent "identities", "parallels", "similarities" and "analogies" are all divided by what appears to be certain irreconcilable, unbridgeable and impossible "différances." in a world where as Jean François Lyotard says, there is only incredulity towards any modernist "meta-narratives".  However, such Derridarean "différances" are never shown to be as sharp, as brutal, as disruptive as they could have been if the film had been produced and directed by a Western director. No doubt the film displays a certain element of postmodern irony and play, yet such display is pervaded with a touch of a very Japanese and a very feminine sense of subtlety.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (比利·林恩的中場戰事)

War is always eye-catching. War means excitement for children, huge profits for  armament merchants, a chance to test newly developed weapons for military scientists, heartbreaking farewells for lovers, a chance to display its national might for the mega-nations out ostensibly for divers noble-sounding "just causes", a bid for honor and glory for young adults good at nothing except displays of barely provoked gang  violence, often sorrows for mothers. Is that all? This is what Lee Ang, three-time Academy award winning director, sets out to explore in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk(2016) a film done with the latest 3-D technology (reality) ie. shot with 120 frame per second instead of the usual 24.

Calvary (七日告別)

It's never easy to be a Catholic priest. It's even more difficult to be one in the contemporary world, where, except in places like Korea and the PRC, church attendance in Europe and America is dwindling by the week: a Catholic priest's soul is burdened with just too many dark and shady secrets of the human psyche in the most intimate details within that tiny enclosed space behind the screen of the "Confessional box" every week, notionally protected by absolute confidentiality. Will he be tempted from such frank revelations to abandon his faith in an omnipotent, omniscient and all merciful God who is the most perfect idealisation of unconditional love and mercy? This seems to be the issue explored by director John Michael McDonagh in Calvary (2014) which opens most dramatically in the confessional, when a priest heard a confession that a man first tasted semen at age seven from another priest, something which marked him for life because that lasted some 5 years. He told the voice on the other side to report it but was told that that priest had long died. Then he was told by that voice that to seek compensation, he must kill another priest, not a bad one but a good priest. He asked whether the intended murderer had anyone in mind. He was told to go to the local beach on the following Sunday and in the meantime to make all necessary preparations. Who might that killer be? We are kept guessing until the end of the film. The priest, Father James is played by Brendan Gleeson.

Viva (古巴女孩)

In these days of globalization, sometimes one can be struck by the most unbelievable combination. When the film Viva (2015) opened last night, I saw Mediterranean style low buildings amidst an occasional palm tree or two; I heard songs with lively Latin rhythms sung in Spanish; the facial features of the characters appearing on the screen definitely betray their Latin origin; when they speak, they talk in Spanish, not in English and most certainly not in Gaelic. Yet it's Ireland's entry for this year's Oscar! It's a film written by Mark O'Halloran and directed by Paddy Breathnach, starring Héctor Medina as the 18 year-old hairdresser Jesus, Jorge Perugorría as Angel, Jesus' father, Luis Alberto García as Mama, the singer-proprietor of a drag club in Havana, Cuba, Renata Maikel Machin Blanco as Pamela, a hot teenage whore and Paula Andrea Ali Rivera as Nita, wrinkle faced grandma of Jesus and the script writer  Mark O'Hallaran as Ray, a gay who was Jesus' first client for sexual services. 

It's a very powerful movie about growing up and finding one's identity amidst some rather unusual conditions. Jesus lives alone in his father's old house. Angel is an ex boxer, just released from a Cuban jail, where he had been locked up for 15 years for a murder, since when Jesus was 3. Jesus earns just barely enough to keep body and soul together as a hair dresser for some old ladies but mainly for a Havana drag club owned  and run by Mama, where Mama sang his heart out every night with some 6 or 7 other other drags. Jesus has no recollection of his father. The only things which connect him to his father and his deceased mother was a pile of old vinyl records and an old fashioned record player left behind by Angel when he was sent to jail, records from which Jesus learned to sing.

The Academy of the Muses (繆思構成研究學院)

Academia is not usually a place where one finds challenging ideas nowadays although for a long time, the contrary image has been indefatigably promoted by those engaged in what's going on behind the walls of those venerable institutions for more than merely academic reasons. But from time to time, there can be exceptions. That's what happened last night, not in an institution of higher learning, but in a film actually shot inside one of the lecture rooms of the University of Barcelona. This occurs in José Luis Guerin's film The Academy of the Muses, which this talented Spanish director produced, wrote, filmed, directed and edited.

Arabian Nights: Vol. III: Encantado (一千零一夜:著魔傳說)

In many ways, Volume III of Arabian Nights: Encantado (2015) by Portuguese director Miguel Gomes is film belonging to a genre all by itself. It's supposed to be based on the from and structure of the stories of Sheherazade, the tales told by a beautiful girl who must keep on telling stories to delight and titilate the imagination and the hunger of the Persian Grand Vizier for "amusement", someone who already has everything that he could possibly want and perhaps for that reason, harbours an insatiable need to hear stories that keeps his attention from falling into the kind of boredom or ennui which awaits him, someone who has given an order that the moment she ceases to tell a story in which his interest flags, that's the moment when her head would be removed from her beautiful body. What kind of stories would she tell? And how can the kinds of stories she narrates somehow be exploited to tell some of the stories of  contemporary Portuguese society?

Oscuro Animal ( 朦朧的獸)

Since the sound track was first added to black and white films in 1929, dialogue has become synonymous with cinematic films. We've become so used to it that it really comes as a great shock if ever we were to see a film without any dialogue at all, as if the film were a mime. When watching such a film, we just keep hoping, without really having to think about it, that soon, the main characters in the film would somehow start to talk to each other. At least, that's my state of mind when I watched the film late yesterday afternoon. But I was disappointed again, again and again. By the middle of the film, I had given up and just concentrated on the mostly static and obviously carefully composed images on the cinematic screen. But though there was no dialogue,  that doesn't mean that that was no sound at all. After all, it was not a silent black and white film with written dialogues or brief narratives or titles projected on to a little screen on the left or right of the main screen, the kind of thing which was habitually done in the cinemas in Hong Kong in the early 1950s. The sound consisted of merely background sounds: heavy rock and roll or and rap music in which the singers keep incessantly firing a random string of phrases which rhyme with each other but which are otherwise totally disconnected and almost as if they were just meaningless sonic components forming part of the all important dynamic rhythm of the music, sound for the sake of sound, sound for the sake of that paramount rhythm and that rhythm as the sonic embodiment of the movement of life itself. There are of course other sounds:the sound of insects, birds, the gurgle of running stream water, the sound of hands grating the metal sheets in dark urban slum dwellings and the sound of gun fire, of loud banging of rifle butts against the side of a coach etc. What am I talking about? It's a most unusual film called  Oscuro Animal (2016) written and directed by the Colombian script-writer-cum-director Filipe Guerrero, a film nominated for the Tiger Award at this year's Rotterdam International Film Festival. "Oscuro" is a Spanish word meaning variously hidden, dim, shadowy, indistinct, dark, murky and gloomy. In the Spanish language, one usually places the adjective after the noun but one can also put it in front of the noun. When one does that, that means the author wishes to give special emphasis to that adjective. In a film without dialogue the way the director creates the title of such a film the placement of that all important adjective takes on a special meaning.

Maryland (Disorder) (失常)

House invasion can be a thrilling cinematic experience like David Finchers's Panic Room (2002). One would have imagined that such house invasion thriller genre would normally be a male director's work. Not so, if we may judge by Maryland (Disorder)(失常) (2015). It's a film directed and co-written by Alice Winocour with Jean-Stéphen Bron. 

In this film a Special Squad French solider Vincent Loreau (Matthias Schoenaerts) who had seen action in Afghanstan and is suffering from Post-traumatic Distress Syndrome with occasional panic attacks and hearing noises is asked to go on leave. During such leave, he is co-copted to join in a commercial security assignment  by his buddy Denis (Paul Hamy) to protect a rich Lebanese merchant Imad Whalid (Percy Kemp) and his beautiful German-French wife Jessie (Diane Kruger) and his kid Ali (Zaïd Errroughi-Demonsant) in a French estate in Southern France fitted with all kinds of spy cameras and a control room covering almost all areas of the estate called Maryland first for a glamorous party where high profile politicians and financiers are involved and later when Whalid leaves on a business trip in Switzerland, to protect just his wife and kid. 

Quand Je ne dors pas (When I don't Sleep)(失眠夜)

It's rare nowadays to see a movie in black and white. But I saw one last night: "Quand Je ne dors pas (When I don't Sleep)(失眠夜") It's the second feature by Tommy Weber (his first being Callao 2009), who co-wrote it with actor Mohamed Kerriche, a film inspired by J D Salinger's prize winning short novel in 1951, The Catcher in the Rye 《麥田捕手》about the which started the now common practice of wearing a baseball cap backwards by teenagers and some ex-teeangers. 

When the film opens, we see a teenager Antoine (Aurélien Gabrielli) asking for the price of a train ticket so that he may to go to see the northeastern coast of France, but he appeared to have no idea which town there he wanted to go to, nor what hours he wanted to go. From the converation, which was not well taken by the train ticket clerk, we learn all he got in his mind is the simple idea of wanting to go to look at the sea the following morning. He asked the clerk which town he could go to and was given four or five names, he just randomly picked one and then asked for the time of departure and then the price. When told it cost $30 Euros. He said it was too expensive because it far exceeded what he got in his pocket and left. He had a problem coming up with the money. So he went to Diego ( Mohamed Kerriche) a friend whom he knew was in the business of selling maijuana. He was given a number of packets which he was told cost $15 Euros but that he could sell it in the market for $30 Euros and split the profit 50: 50. 

Valley of Love(愛之谷)

What is the boundary between reality and illusion, between truth and self-deception, between fact and fiction, between the past and the present, between indifference and love, between life and death, between death and resurrection, between living and ghostly living. These are questions which surface in my mind as I watch Guillaume Nicloux's Valley of Love 2015.

It's a simple story, Gérard (Gérard Depardieu) meets Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert) at a motel in Death Valley, California because 6 months ago, each received a letter written by their gay photographer son Michael just before he committed suicide, telling them that they should meet for a week there and visit various spots in the Death Valley. The two had not met for years after their divorce, each now remarried and lead separate lives.

Un Homme Idéal (A Perfect Man) (完美的男人)

The title of my next film at the French film festival may not be all that we initially think: Un Homme Idéal (A Perfect Man) (完美的男人). Directed by Yann Gozlan and co-written by him with Guillaume Lemans and Grégoire Vigneron and starring the award winning Pierre Niney as Mathieu Vasseur, an aspiring and then a famous writer and Ana Girardot as his wife Alice Furnac, the principal protagonists, the story is about how a nobody working as a house-moving laborer who dreams of becoming a novelist actually became one by stealing the memoires of the Algerian War in 1957 and 1958 in manuscript form (before he was born) written of one of his company's customers during one of the removal exercises and passing it off as his own work.

Marguerite et Julien (瑪格麗特與朱利安)

Incest is always a controversial subject. Although habitual among the families of ancient Pharaohs in Egypt and among Sassanian royalties in ancient Persia, it has always been looked upon with horror by Christian Europe, especially in late 16th/early 17th century France, a time when such corporal intimacy was considered both socially scandalous and legally criminal. Julien and Marguerite died on December, 2, 6013, after their sentence was commuted by the then King of France from death by hanging to death by decapitation and were buried in the same tomb in the castle of Tourlaville. They were brothers and sisters.

This was the subject of Valérie Donzelli's film Marguerite et Julien (2015), adpated from the novel Julien et Marguerite by Jean Gruault and first offered to but rejected by François Truffaut in the 1960s. The brother Julien de Ravalet (Jérémie Elkaïm) and sister Marguerite de Ravalet (Anäis Demoustier) were the beloved children of Jean de Ravalet (Frédéric Pierrot), the lord of Tourlaville and Madame de Ravalet (Aurélia Petit) had been inseparable since infancy: playing, drawing, studying, riding, sleeping together and as children they swore to each other that they will always love each other and will never abandon the other. But when they reach puberty, Julien was sent with his elder brother Philippe (Bastien Boulllon) to England, Holland and Germany to receive training in finance, commerce and weapons. When they returned, it was time for Marguerite to get married. On the day of the arranged marriage, first Julien excused himself from the dinner table in the middle of the wedding reception, then Marguerite did the same shortly thereafter. After an unduly long time, the family of the bridegroom stormed out. The brother and sister were subsequently found at the stables by Madame de Ravalet, in the middle of an intimate game of guessing the word written first on the palm and then on each other's back. The word got around and no further suitors could be found and finally Marguerite's parents married him to the only available choice, the very wealthy local tax inspector Lefebvre (Raoul Fernandez), at the family chapel by their paternal uncle, the Abbé de Hambye (Sami Frey), Julien absenting himself from the ceremony.

A Trois, on y va (All About them) (三人行)

A third person in a relationship invariably creates problems. What happens when the third in a relationship is simultaneously in love with the original two? This seems to be the theme explored by director Jérôme Bonnell, in A trois, on y va (literally "Three together, let's go") ("All About them")  (三人行)(2015) directed co-written by him with Maël Piriou. A Trois, on y va is a light comical look at the complicated romantic and at times erotic dilemmas that can result when the three are mixed up in such a complex game of musical chair, given the law of Newtonian physics that a person can only be at one place at any particular point in time.

Floride (Florida) (佛羅里達州)

Old age or senility has always been a problem. Perhaps less a problem in previous ages because even as near to now as just about a hundred years ago, the average life expectancy of a typical human seldom soared above 50. Even in ancient China, when there was much less polluted food, polluted water, polluted air etc, 70 was already considered a very "rare" age for the typical Chinese man or woman to attain. When one reaches 80, that seemed incredible. But not now. According to the figures released by WHO for 2013, the average man in HK now lives up to 81 and the average woman 86. And for France the corresponding figures are 79 and 85.  So, what may happen? That's what Philippe Le Guay's Floride (Florida), adapted for the screen by himself and Jérôme Tonnerre  from a prize winning play "Le Père" by Florian Zeller is all about.