Hollywood, Hong Kong

Hollywood, Hong Kong is the second part of a threepart series by Chan about prostitutes, after the more realistic Durian, Durian (screened last year in Rotterdam).The film is set in one of Hong Kong’s last slum districts. The Chu family, father with two sons, sells pork from a stall in the street. All three Chus are as fat as sumo wrestlers. In the same district lives a punk who overestimates himself, Wong Chikeung (18), with a young whore. Bordering on the slum district is a luxury apartment building: the Hollywood complex. In this building lives a beautiful young woman who calls herself Hunghung, but operates under different aliases. She regularly ventures into the slums to eat pork at the stall of the Chu family. First she seduces the punk, then the eldest son of father Chu and finally father Chu himself. From that moment on, Wong Chikeung and the Chus get threatening letters from a lawyer: if they don’t pay large sums of money they will be charged with having sex with an underage girl (namely Hunghung, who now calls herself Tungtung).From this moment on, the director changes his tune. The light romantic tone of the film turns to absurdism and there are soon lumps of human meat on the pork stall. The film only regains its original tone during the moving ending.