The Longest Summer is the second film to come from Fruit Chan, director and
screenwriter of Made in Hong Kong (one of my favorite films). So the obvious question
to ask would be "is it as good?" No, but it's still an excellent film.

The Longest Summer is set in the summer of 1997, during the months leading up to
and following the handover of Hong Kong to China. At the beginning of the film,
several of the main characters are being dismissed following the dissolution of the
Hong Kong division of the British Army. The movie follows one of these men, Ga Yin,
in his efforts to find a place for himself in a new Hong Kong.

Ga Yin is recruited into a triad by his brother, Ga Suen, himself a low-level triad
member. Ga Yin tries to insist that he is just doing a job like any other, though he
knows better. Meanwhile, he and his unemployed friends begin discussing a bank
robbery as a way to make money. There is also a subplot revolving around Jane, a
woman with whom Ga Yin and Ga Suen have a chance encounter near the beginning
of the film. This is pretty much the entire plot. The script is more about the
characters than about developing the story.

Part of the genius of The Longest Summer is its avoidance of almost all the obvious
paths it could have taken. While this could have been a simple movie about people's
lives taking a turn for the worse, this film manages to constantly find a less obvious
way to make its point. For example, in a typical tale such as this, the bank robbery
would go wrong, resulting in the bloody deaths of many of its main characters. This
film, however, manages to find something besides success or failure to make its point.

The strongest theme in The Longest Summer seems to be the unpredictability of life.
It illustrates this theme without seeming as if the screenwriter had simply tried to
think of the strangest occurrences possible to throw at the characters. Being a film
about the handover to Hong Kong made in 1998, when there were still many
questions about Hong Kong's future, this film is a perfect echo of what many people
had to be feeling at the time (and are probably still feeling).

Compared to Made in Hong Kong, this film is fairly tame in terms of editing and
visual style. Frankly, I missed the more experimental style of Fruit Chan's previous
film. The moments where he does use something out of the ordinary are very effective
but they are few and far between. The quality of the film would not have been hurt by
more visual experimentation. In addition, The Longest Summer doesn't have the
perfect union of musical visual elements found in Made in Hong Kong. There is
nothing wrong with the music, but it doesn't lift the film to another level either.

Overall, Fruit Chan's sophomore film is excellent, though less stunning than his first.
I will be very much looking forward to anything he does in the future, and I hope he
can recapture the utter magic of Made in Hong Kong.