Viewers who leave To Where He Belongs during the first reel may be forgiven for thinking this is just another triad melodrama. It isn’t. Despite an opening that is not too different than the myriad of low budget gangster pictures Hong Kong audiences have been subjected to during the past decade, this one gradually weaves an intricate web of relationships that clearly stamps the picture as something above the run-of-the-mill.

The characters and situations populating Anthony Chan Chi-hung’s script seem familiar enough. Wui (Simon Yam Tat-wah) is an aging hoodlum whose values belong to an earlier generation, when loyalty and honour meant almost as much as superior fighting skills. Wui’s chief henchman, Fung (Steven Ma Chun-wai), is more impetuous and hot-headed, but totally devoted to his mentor until a woman comes between them. She is Yuet (Gigi Lai Chi), a good-time girl with an “I don’t care” attitude that both Fung and Wui find irresistible. A turf war with unscrupulous gang leader Tung (Ben Ng Ngai-cheung) threatens to end all their lives.

Yes, it sounds all-too-familiar, but Chan’s script and Ally Wong Ka-fai’s direction transform it into something more. Yuet, who starts out as such a stereotypical “bad girl”, ends up having facets that few celluloid gang molls possess. Even the hackneyed device of her potentially fatal illness adds depth rather than cheap tears. Yuet’s sense of her own mortality stands in stark contrast to the tough guys who seem to take their lives—and the possibility of early deaths—for granted.

A dark humour pervades Yuet’s exchanges with the people in her life. When Wui declines to go out on a date with Yuet on the pretext of having to look after his elderly uncle’s book stall, she places a little sign next to the sleeping white-haired gentleman: “Closed today due to death of owner.” After Fung impetuously Yuet on another occasion, he asks her, “Didn’t you have any feeling when I held you?” “Yes,” she replies. “I felt like dying.” Both instances provoked huge laughs from the audience at the film’s premiere.

The bonds between Yuet and her hospitalized grandmother are bittersweet, the two carping at each other but only thinly masking an underlying love. When the wheelchair-bound lady states, “At least granny was young once. I don’t know if you’ll ever be old,” the sentiments evoked are both droll and poignant.

Wong’s direction is sometimes crude, as when he intercuts a nightclub beating with bad guy Tung relieving himself in the toilet. The movie also has more than its share of typical triad rumbles, with Tung at one point urinating into the vanquished Fung’s mouth. There are also the inevitable song montages, inevitable since two cast members (Steve Ma and Ray Chan Kin-wing) are also singers. But these cliches are more than balanced by a number of unusual touches, such as the food stall where the proprietor doesn’t bring the customers what they order but what they want.

As Wui, Simon Yam follows up his triad boss in Juliet in Love with another nuanced gangster portrayal (though one wonders how the down-and-out Wui had time for the tanning salon). Gigi Lai, in one of the pithiest roles of her big screen career, gives Yuet an understated pathos.

The movie’s philosophy is symbolized by Wui’s cigarette lighter, an expensive silver number that Yuet initially plans to toss out when it runs out of fuel. By the end of the film, she realizes that things of value are worth replenishing no matter how great the effort. The lesson of To Where He Belongs is to not judge a movie by its first reel.

This review is copyright (c) 2000 by Paul Fonoroff. All rights reserved. No part of the review may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.