Plot :John (Irons) is an English photojournalist who has spent over a decade in Hong Kong; his friend Jim (Blades) often crashes in his cramped apartment. John's unrequited love is Vivian (Gong Li) whom he aches for but has not the nerve to possess. Concurrent with England's transfer of Hong Kong back to the Chinese, John discovers that he has a rare form of leukemia and has only months to live. So John, Jim, and the disfigured proto-hippy Jean (Cheung) grab a digital video camera and prowl the streets, seeking to document the "real" Hong Kong one last time.
Review:
An educated concubine in feudal China (Raise the Red Lantern). A prostitute caught between two childhood friends during the 1940s (Farewell My Concubine). A wife and mother facing tragedy in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution (To Live). A sultry temptress in the heart of the '30s Shanghai gangland (Shanghai Triad). These are some of the roles essayed by Chinese actress Gong Li, and they have one thing in common all of them take place decades or even centuries ago. Even in The Story of Qui Ju, a contemporary tale, Gong's character comes from a remote village where the technology and customs are those of the past. Not until Chinese Box has any director given Gong the role of a modern woman.
Nothing if not self-important, Wayne Wang's Chinese Box evokes Hong Kong, and its 1997 delivery to Chinese rule, as a soul-scorching millennial metaphor. And as far as soul-scorching millennial metaphors go, you could do worse: Hong Kong is more pensive and less horrifying than Bosnia, more fashionable than Kuwait, more apocalyptic than New York or L.A. Combining aspects of Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, Wim Wenders's Tokyo Ga, and the William Holden romance, The World of Suzie Wong, Wang's movie is more rueful meditation than drama. And though it has plenty of tragic corn, it presents itself as being intellectual, ruminative, even philosophical.
Wayne Wang's reputation as a director has unfairly hung on the immense and largely synthetic success of The Joy Luck Club. Whereas his ethnic and cinematic pride infused Amy Tan's stiff adaptation of her bestselling novel with a soaking visual richness, Wang later, in two improvisational collaborations with writer Paul Auster (Smoke and Blue in the Face), proved himself a free-spirited filmmaker as he rekindled the quirky, on-the-street atmosphere that had been absent from his works since his American debut, Chan Is Missing. That's why Chinese Box is such a refreshingly raw, emotional odyssey: it allows the Asian-American auteur to engage his cultural-political ardor within an affecting, neo-realistic framework.
Wayne Wang's Chinese Box is a film about and inspired by people caught up in the handover of Hong Kong to China.
Shot on location in Hong Kong during the real-life events with a changing script that was adapted to whatever was happening each day, Chinese Box possesses a wonky cinema verite feel that keeps it motoring even when the film is falling apart.
Reading the “Hong Kong Trauma” in Wayne Wang’s Chinese Box
by Esther M. K. Cheung, University of Hong Kong
“Wayne Wang’s Chinese Box (1997) is a film about trauma, amnesia, and fantasy. Just as trauma is a symptom of history and fantasy is a symptom of amnesia, this paper is an attempt to engage in a symptomatic reading of the film. As a coded, ciphered form, a symptom calls for interpretation since “there is no symptom without an addressee,” as Slavoj Zizek puts it. Leela Ghandi suggests a similar kind of reading in postcolonial studies…”
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