Quotes of the Day

It's hard to tell what looks worse at the start of Hollywood Hong Kong: the blanched, blood-flecked, bloated pig carcasses hanging in Chu's Barbecue Shop, or the blanched, blood-flecked, bloated Mr. Chu (Glen Chin) and his obese sons Ming (Ho Sai-man) and Tiny (Leung Sze-ping). Perhaps the pigs, in a toss-up. They are dead. The Chus look only halfway there.

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Indie director Fruit Chan established himself with gritty films about the "real" Hong Kong, the dingy city beneath the skyscrapers. From the washed-up triads of The Longest Summer to the street urchin of Little Cheung, Chan's characters scrape the depths to survive, aided by just enough street humor to make life tolerable. With its menagerie of losers leavened by twisted romance, Hollywood Hong Kong is a lighter film, literally, than its predecessors. By day the sun shines through the tin roofs and sultry shacks of the Chus' shantytown in the New Territories, and by night a lunar white shines from the modern apartments of nearby Hollywood Plaza. That's where the enterprising, Shanghai girl Tong Tong (Zhou Xun) lives, dreaming of the real Hollywood, before she jolts the Chus into life, then sets them burning.

To Mr. Chu, whose greatest object of affection since his wife left has been his giant pig Mama, Tong Tong is inspiration, a reason to lift his head out of the slop. To his porcine-eyed son Ming, whose bedroom is decorated with pinups, she's fantasy made flesh. To Wong Chi-keung (Wong You-nam), a wannabe triad, she's the golden hooker who'll make him a pimp. And to Tiny, she's a friend—his only one. Like most heavenly gifts, however, Tong Tong is not what she seems. She teaches the painful lesson that nothing comes free in the new Hong Kong.

The movie is Zhou's first outside of mainland China, but her luscious portrayal of Tong Tong, a woman by turns wide-eyed and desperate, shanghais the show. That's no mean feat for an ingenue, and except for Zhou and Glen Chin, all the film's actors are amateurs Chan plucked from the street. Despite the director's deft touch with comic characters, not all manage watchable performances. Chin's gruff, soulful Chu is a match for Tong Tong, and Leung earns kudos as the least annoying fat kid in recent Chinese cinema. But Ho's Ming does little more than sweat. Wong's manic energy nicely counters the Chus' torpor, but his strangled-cat tone deserves an even worse punishment than the film finally delivers.

Zhou gives Hollywood its bittersweet lilt. When she disappears two-thirds of the way through, the movie descends into jarring absurdism, replete with violent mutilations, an unexpected murder and unhygienic pork butchery. Pigs become nearly indistinguishable from people, and Chan just rescues his work from an unsatisfying dissonance with an ending that returns to the film's essential sweetness. Life in Hong Kong may be getting bleaker by the day, but Fruit Chan knows the lights of Hollywood haven't gone out yet.

• Bryan Walsh
• Fruit Chan's Hollywood Hong Kong finds redemption for fat butchers and an unhappy Shanghai hooker