Cross-Harbour Tunnel

Don’t worry, the fact that Cross Harbour Tunnel’s structure of four unpredictably intersecting stories is a knock-off from Pulp Fiction is not a problem. This is not a film in thrall to yesterday’s flavour-of-the-month. Lawrence Wong presumably liked the Tarantino film, but he also likes Taiwanese art movies, Stephen Chiau nonsense comedies, Filipino melodramas and heaven knows what else. His film (written, he says, in one night, and shot in one week with much help from friends) is a melting pot of enthusiasm, jokes and provocations. It contains something, as they say, for every palate. These four stories in brief: one’s about a nervous middle-class couple venturing into a love hotel for the first time; one’s about a kid just recruited into a triad gang making his first delivery; one’s about a lovelorn Filipina maid; and one (this is a wicked parody of Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive l’amour) is about a guy who finds the keys to an apartment, starts using its bathroom and gradually falls in love with its absent owner. Each story offers rough-and-ready fun in its own right. Watching them intersect is quite a gas. Tony Rayns