Hong Kong / USA,
1989, 85 min
Shown in 1990
CREDITS
- dir
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Wayne Wang
- prod
-
John Koon-chung Chan, Wayne Wang
- scr
-
Spencer Nakasako
- cam
-
Amir M. Mokri
- editor
-
Chris Sanderson, Sandy Nervig
- cast
-
Spencer Nakasako, Cora Miao, Lo Wai, Lam Chung, Victor Wong
- source
-
Far East Stars Ltd., 3257 Oakshire Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90068, USA, FAX: 213-874-3393
-
COMMENTS
Wayne Wang, Spencer Nakasako and Cora Miao (Mrs. Wayne Wang) in person.
OTHER
For those of you how think of Wayne Wang as a sweet-tempered director of films like Chan Is Missing and Eat a Bowl of Tea, get ready for his tangy side. Ostensibly the story of a nameless Asian-American hero negotiating "the Wild East," Wang's fifth feature is as much a sneering portrait of cultural decay, riotously stapled to an anti-travelogue of Hong Kong. The hero, a string-tied cowboy played by San Francisco's Spencer Nakasako, is on a courier mission. Unable to find the recipient of his mysterious valise, the pseudo-cowpoke descends to H.K.'s underworld. Along the way, he encounters a Triad mistress (played by Cora Miao), the Elvis of Asia, a prostitute with a gas mask, and a blind philosopher (played by local favorite Victor Wong). The Arbus-like oddballs are placed within an imploding narrative, detonated by lush, violent images—flash-frames of a severed hand, bound ducks flapping in a slaughterhouse. Cross-breeding the mythos of the Western with the steely gaze of the gangster film, Wang has corralled his most ambitious, most elliptical and certainly darkest film yet. Life Is Cheap… tallies up the excesses of traditional Chinese culture and sees it as a dim sum.
—Steve Seid
FACTOID #134
The 1986 San Francisco International’s Discovering Mike Leigh was the director’s first retrospective in the U.S. According to the San Francisco Examiner, Festival Artistic Director Peter Scarlet compared the then-unknown Leigh to Yasujiro Ozu before his work had achieved international recognition; while the latter director had been considered ’too Japanese’ for global audiences, Leigh was considered ’too British.’
