浮云游子

Opening with a subjective long take slithering through Soho’s Chinatown, which ends up in a close-up of a man died inside a telephone booth, British-Chinese filmmaker Leong Po-Chih’s PING PONG is a rara avis that plumbs into the head space of UK’s Chinese enclave.

The dead man is Sam Wong (K.C. Leong), a well-to-do restaurateur, but the film doesn’t intend to dwell on the circumstances of his death, but, in the wake of that, the execution of his testament, which falls on the shoulders of a tenderfoot law clerk Elaine Choi (Sheen), who is terminally stalwart to see that she can get the job done, including settling the legal procedures of sending Wong’s body back to Toisan, China, and finding out who is the mysterious legatee of Wong’s sportster, a woman named Sara Lee (Hammond).

But the lion’s share of her endeavor is involved functioning as an intermediary among Wong’s clan (he is survived by a wife, 3 adult children, one from a prior marriage), which is awash with internal strifes relative to Sam’s will, hence, the film’s title, alluding to Elaine’s oscillating role in her pursuance.

Political angle aside, sideswipes about China’s communist apparat are only to be expected, PING PONG primarily earns its stripes as a treatise about a young British-Chinese woman’s double consciousness in forging her own identity in an occidental capital without obliterating her ethnic roots, like the “woman warrior” she watches on television or reads in the picture-story books when she was young, Elaine is fascinated by her cultural background, but at the same time, as a modern woman, she is dismissive of its shibboleth, so revered by the older generation, perhaps, that is why she finds kindred spirit in Sam’s younger son Mike (Yip, the most naturalistic performer among the fold), who looks totally anglicized on the surface, which, in time, will be encroached by the oriental filial obligation.

Sporting a plummy British accent, Sheen’s Elaine is jaunty and confident when she is in the line of duty, but, like most of the rest cast, hokes a bit whenever Leong’s direction sags. The bum note is the erratic editing rhythm, sometimes, a conversation is cut short abruptly, or the camera overstays its welcome on the players who seem to have just finished his or her lines and their reactive impulse is unstimulated, for example, the sequences pertaining to a meshuga Mr. Chen (Robert Lee, in his swan song), the old friend of Sam, are taxing to sit through, not for its length, but an unmoderated monotony.

That said, PING PONG still can be ranked as a hidden gem of the world cinema, not merely on the strength of its subject matters, Leong’s dexterity (a well-concocted location shot taking place in the same place with different temporal slots is spliced seamlessly), but also for its prescience-laced mystique revealed in the coda, to its western audience, it introduces a mythical culture that cannot be more different from theirs, but for those who are from the east, it also hits the bull-eye of enacting a vicarious displacement that is one of the wellsprings of cinematic imagination.

referential entries: John Carpenter’s BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (1986, 4.9/10); Lulu Wang’s THE FAREWELL (2019, 7.8/10).