Dis­cov­er this anar­chic ​’90s por­trait of youth­ful despair

“The world is mov­ing much too fast. So fast, that when you final­ly get to fit in with it, it’s become anoth­er brand new world!”

So says Mid-Autumn (Sam Lee), the young skin­ny high school dropout who is both hero and anti-hero of Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong. In a sense, Mid-Autumn’s words cap­ture the live-fast-die-young spir­it of a vibrant com­ing-of-age indie which keeps stick­ing its rebel­lious fin­ger up to the val­ues of Hong Kong’s adults while lit­er­al­ly danc­ing over their graves. Mid-Autumn embod­ies the sullen punk ener­gy of a youth­ful gen­er­a­tion who feel betrayed by their elders, and whose strug­gle to find a place for them­selves, as well as a mod­icum of self-respect, rep­re­sents a rite of pas­sage that will res­onate with any­one who either is, or ever has been, an adolescent.

Despite the uni­ver­sal­i­ty of these themes, Made in Hong Kong is a film very much tied to a par­tic­u­lar time and place. For as Mid-Autumn, his girl­friend Ping (Neiky Yim Hui-Chi) and his dimwit­ted friend Sylvester (Wen­ders Li) go through the tri­als of their teenage years, their adven­tures unfold in a coun­try that is under­go­ing trans­for­ma­tions of its own. The film’s events take place in 1997, the year in which the Unit­ed King­dom returned sov­er­eign­ty over Hong Kong to main­land Chi­na. Chan alle­goris­es this han­dover through the grow­ing pains of young peo­ple hav­ing, as Mid-Autumn puts it lat­er, ​“to face an uncer­tain world”.

Mid-Autumn and his friends real­ly are made in Hong Kong – prod­ucts of pover­ty, aban­don­ment and few prospects (besides the spec­tac­u­lar views from the rooftops of their hous­ing projects and from the hills of the Wo Hop Shek Ceme­tery). The hulk­ing, intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled Sylvester is con­stant­ly being bul­lied; Ping will die if she does not soon get a kid­ney trans­plant; and Mid-Autumn, whose very name emblema­tis­es an inter­me­di­ate sta­tus, is free­lanc­ing as a debt col­lec­tor for a Tri­ad with­out yet hav­ing com­mit­ted to join­ing them.

All three have been aban­doned by their fathers (Sylvester and Mid-Autumn by their moth­ers too), and while this reflects a peri­od where many males of work­ing age real­ly were being lured to the main­land for employ­ment and start­ing sec­ond fam­i­lies there, it is also pos­si­ble to regard all these miss­ing fathers as fig­ures for a Britain relin­quish­ing its author­i­ty over the ter­ri­to­ry, and leav­ing its local ​‘chil­dren’ in the lurch.

Cer­tain­ly Mid-Autumn har­bours an intense hatred for his absent father, blam­ing him for all his own prob­lems in life, and more than once plot­ting to kill him with a meat cleaver. Mid-Autumn’s occa­sion­al vio­lent rages, how­ev­er, are for the most part blus­ter. His bed­room may be fes­tooned with posters for Oliv­er Stone’s Nat­ur­al Born Killers and Luc Besson’s Léon. But one of the lessons that he will learn over the course of Made in Hong Kong is that killing oth­ers or indeed your­self is a messier, more dif­fi­cult busi­ness than the movies would have us believe.

Made in Hong Kong is dri­ven by eros and thanatos. After Sylvester chances upon the corpse of lovelorn school­girl Susan Hui (Tam Ka-Chuen) – who has just thrown her­self from the top of a build­ing – he, Mid-Autumn and Ping find them­selves in pos­ses­sion of the two bloody let­ters that she was clutch­ing in her hands. The three take it upon them­selves to deliv­er these mis­sives to their addressees, only to give up on the task halfway through. But the thought (or per­haps the ghost) of Susan con­tin­ues to haunt Mid-Autumn’s wak­ing life and his wet dreams, con­fronting him with his own mor­tal­i­ty, even as he falls ​“crazy in love with a very sick girl.” Here, as kiss­es are exchanged in grave­yards, death is nev­er far away from these vital teens.

Mid-Autumn’s strong rebel­lious streak, his refusal to join a gang and his insis­tence upon main­tain­ing his inde­pen­dence, close­ly ally him to Fruit Chan him­self. After serv­ing as direc­tor-for-hire on the com­e­dy Five Lone­ly Hearts and the hor­ror Finale in Blood – both gener­ic stu­dio films – Chan decid­ed that he would go his own way, tak­ing full con­trol of the pro­duc­tion process and shoot­ing guer­ril­la style with film reel off­cuts and expired stock.

Shot entire­ly inde­pen­dent­ly of the stu­dios and cast with unknowns, Made in Hong Kong has a verve and a visu­al style that many a film made on a much big­ger bud­get strug­gles to achieve, earn­ing Chan a slew of prizes (includ­ing Best Pic­ture) at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 1998. Yet its last words, a radio report, cite Chair­man Mao, and refer to a trans­la­tion­al shift from Can­tonese to Man­darin that marks the pass­ing of the old Hong Kong and the arrival of Chi­na as the new dad­dy on the scene.

It is a bit­ter­sweet end­ing, with the quo­ta­tion of Mao on the promise of youth com­ing even as our ears are still ring­ing with Mid-Autumn’s rather dif­fer­ent words on the same top­ic: ​“If we die young, we remain for­ev­er young.” The film pois­es itself between these two posi­tions, even as Hong Kong was look­ing towards an uncer­tain future in a brand new world.

Made in Hong Kong is avail­able on Blu-ray, in a 4K restora­tion as part of Eure­ka! Video’s The Mas­ters of Cin­e­ma Series on 21 September.