Review | The Calling of a Bus Driver movie review: Ivana Wong plays a jilted woman in Patrick Kong’s comedy drama
- Wong plays Suki, who has been prised away from her businessman boyfriend Chico by scheming Kiki from China, whose ex-partner pops up to call her a swindler
- Scenes of farcical humour, a Kong trademark, are laced into a nuanced relationship drama, a departure for a director not known for showing depth or subtlety
3/5 stars
A working-class woman learns to let go and become independent after breaking up with her long-time boyfriend in this comedy drama produced, written and directed by Patrick Kong Pak-keung.
Together with his Lunar New Year offering You Are the One , Kong has now come up with two decent movies in a year – no small feat for someone who used to be one of Hong Kong’s most critically derided filmmakers.
Singer-actress Ivana Wong Yuen-chi reunites with Kong after their 2018 collaboration A Beautiful Moment , and shelves her usually wacky screen persona for the straight leading role in The Calling of a Bus Driver. She plays Suki, the former girlfriend and business partner of Chico (Edmond Leung Hon-man), the kind yet gullible inheritor of an old-fashioned chilli sauce business in Hong Kong.
The film opens with a chaotic scene at the wedding banquet of Chico and a woman from China, Kiki (Jacky Cai Jie), in which Suki is wrongly accused of being a gatecrasher. The story then goes back two years to show us how Suki’s relationship with Chico was destroyed by Kiki, a deceitful entrepreneur who gradually came between the couple with the objective of getting his family sauce brand into China.