A Moment of Romance

(Tian ruo you qing)
Benny Chan, Hong Kong, 1990
2 out of 4 stars

A jewelry heist leads to a getaway, which leads to a hostage situation, which leads the most carelessly-run police lineup I’ve seen in a film (who knows if the Hong Kong police were or still are that careless), which to an unlikely, and somewhat poorly-motivated, love between a triad (Andy Lau) and a well-off, sheltered young woman (Wu Shien-lien. The English title is perhaps misleading in that the majority of the “moments” in the film are devoted to “romance.” The gangster plot, while crowded with violent but ill-defined feuding bigshots whose machinations are difficult to follow, is mostly relegated to the backdrop.

Despite all this, A Moment of Romance is a particularly unfocused film even in its brief 90 or so minutes. Characterization is all but nonexistent; instead all the principles, including a “sidekick” who hints at being developmentally challenged, are just one-dimensional stock characters, which is perhaps unsurprising considering that the plot is also quite clichéd; there are a couple flirtations with moral ambiguity, but even those seem to be rote in the context of the overall film. Furthermore, nothing about how the film unfolded encouraged me to relate to the characters or to be concerned about their fates; the closest I came to that was a highly-detached, mild curiosity about which of the several conventional paths the filmmakers would take as the ending loomed (and it’s not all that hard to guess, either).

Of course, style can sometimes make up for these failings, but despite some promising flourishes in the early car chase sequence, there is little about the film that is stylistically compelling either. As is typical of even the better Hong Kong films from this era, the music is uninformly horrible, either baroque or repetitive, and at least three interminable Cantopop song montages caused me to decrease the volume. Honestly, it wasn’t an entirely painful experience, but I’m at a loss as to why this was recommended on various websites (I forget which, exactly). Perhaps it was more a product of its time than anything, or perhaps I just don’t appreciate the style.

Source: Tai Seng DVD
17 Aug, 11:06 PM