A mess of a film captures a fractured, furious Hong Kong nearing The Handover. An endless foot chase leading to nowhere, handheld detours into grotesque meat markets, a manic freak out disassociated from rhythm or form. Incoherent political ramblings from a filmmaker wholly unconcerned with whether you get it, it simply must come out. Everything is money, most importantly our bodies. What we put in it, what comes out of it, it’s all capital. There’s always somebody above you to shovel shit for. 

Marc Maron always tells this embarrassing story about Damon Wayans telling him “I’m gonna do a Jazz set” before going on stage at The Comedy Store decades ago. I imagine Wayne Wang had similar sentiments on his mind when briefly fled Hollywood filmmaking to return home and throw every angry thought he had about the city that’s forever fucked by colonialism at the wall. Only here, his ambitions were admirable and not some bullshit line that blew a young podcaster’s mind. 

Anyhow, I’m way off topic. None of this comes together into something cogent. But that hardly matters. Predicts the humiliation of the gig economy by a good thirty years. I know for me, twenty-ish years of a professional life stacking job after job after job tends to break your brain a little bit. You sort of stop remembering why you’re doing this or for whom, instead your thoughts turn to mush as you haphazardly string together a paycheck. Never seems to matter how much you make, the cost of living, ever elusive, just keeps hurtling past you. That’s what this film feels like. Radu Jude’s had to have seen it. 

Good shit.