25-9-20
There are residents called ‘McRefugees’ who sleep or even live in 24-hour McDonald’s restaurants in Hong Kong. Some may be homeless. Others face family estrangements. A few are losers. Individuals get mental issues. One answered the reporter like this, “There is no air conditioning in my tiny bunk bed. Here, I can use free WiFi and talk with friends.”
In the 80s, when I was a young man, McDonald’s was my best loved QSR(quick service restaurant). It was trendy, clean and inexpensive. Surprisingly, McDonald’s has become a philanthropic shelter for the poor.
i’m livin’ it麥路人, as a Hong Kong film about the homeless or home absconders, should be based on the research on McRefugees. The characters include: an ex-prisoner who gathered no courage to see his mother, an old man depressed by the loss of his wife, a dead dog whose desire was just to buy food for survival, an unsuccessful singer whose life was being physically and emotionally depleted, and a widow who was abused by her mother-in-law. The scriptwriter was able to gratify her research ambition on poverty and social injustice to satiety.
There may be 2 kinds of serious movies. Some have really deeper ideas and after watching, the audience will have a lot to think about. Some are just about serious topics but the serious topics are examined superficially. i’m livin’ it is a very ambitious film on the socially heavy topics but it fails to analyse a twig of the problems. The film does achieve to bring about social awareness of such poverty in Hong Kong but the mission merely ends up there.
What a team gives to a film may not be the direct proportion to its box office. However, it will result in praise which roots and spreads. The recent films of Hong Kong particularly i’m livin’ it were all produced seriously and the quality was reinforced by adding details to cinematography, art direction, costume and even props. Such sincere productions are, for example, Legally Declared Dead死因無可疑 (about a family murder), Beyond The Dream幻愛 (about the love story of a mental patient) and Fatal Visit 聖荷西謀殺案 (about Chinese outlanders in America).
i’m livin’ it is however more akin to a soap opera despite its serious production: it is full of explicit melodramatic ensemble casts (so that the multiple actors each have a part to display his or her acting) and tearful sentimentality. All storylines are about having no money, no job, no food, no love and no family. Tragedies interconnect and affect one another in order to make sure the audience will feel sorrowful. Of course, cancer illness and death cannot be strategically separated from these tragedies.
We may need soap operas on TV dramas since TV is free. How many would like to pay for a film in theatres which turn out to be a soap opera? Sad movies may knock me down but certainly a shallow but doleful movie cannot tear me apart. Often, silence hurts more than crying one’s eyes out.
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