Opinion / Why doesn’t Hong Kong make great romance films any more? Since Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood For Love and Mabel Cheung’s An Autumn’s Tale, few films have matched their success

Feb 13 , 2022

Many of Wong Kar-wai’s early movies, like Chungking Express, were art-house romance films focused on love and longing. Photo: Jet Tone Production

The likes of Jackie Chan and John Woo may have found global success with their action films, but romantic flicks were once a Hong Kong speciality too

These days, few such films can match classics like Maggie Cheung’s Comrades, Almost a Love Story, or Chungking Express – could the Hallyu Wave be to blame?

During Hong Kong cinema’s 1980s-90s heyday, filmmakers in the city set new standards for action films. Building on the legacy established by Bruce Lee, the likes of Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and Chow Yun-fat raised the genre to new heights with hits like Police Story, Project A and A Better Tomorrow, to name but a few.

But while Hong Kong cinema’s global fame was founded on action hits like these – the kind that would take John Woo and Yuen Woo-ping to Hollywood and have such an impact on films like The Matrix – what’s less well-known are the number of excellent romance films and romcoms produced in Hong Kong.

In fact, these films used to be a local speciality and were often more popular than the kung fu and “bullet ballet” films that wowed audiences overseas. Take two Chow Yun-fat’s films from 1989 as examples. Chow’s dramatic romance flick All About Ah-Long pulled in nearly US$4 million at the Hong Kong box office, while his now revered action classic The Killer grossed a more modest US$2.3 million.

For the longest time it was the Maggie Cheung-Leon Lai romance Comrades, Almost a Love Story that held the record for most Hong Kong Film Awards – winning nine – until it was eventually outdone by Wong Kar-wai’s artsy kung fu meditation The Grandmaster, winning 12 in 2014. Speaking of Wong, it was his early films of yearning and unrequited love – the likes of Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love – that first brought him critical attention and international applause.

Brigitte Lin and Takeshi Kaneshiro in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express. Photo: Jet Tone Production

All of which prompts the question, what happened to Hong Kong’s strong tradition of excellent romance films?

Arguably Hong Kong’s last great romcoms came from director Edmond Pang Ho-cheung with his Love in a Puff trilogy, which featured Miriam Yeung and Shawn Yu as a couple who bonded over sneaky cigarettes following Hong Kong’s newly implemented ban on smoking indoors. However, Love on the Cuff concluded the series back in 2017, and there’s been precious little of that calibre since. Even during the seven year gap between the first and third films, little else of note came along either.

So what is to blame?

A lack of star power is likely one reason. In the same way that the local Canto-pop industry has failed to reinvent itself in recent years – save for one hit group we all might know by now – still relying on big names from the past to sell records and concert tickets, so too has Hong Kong cinema, often relying on established stars who made their names back in the 80s or 90s.

Such film stars do have an existing fan base and provide a guarantee of a reasonable bottom line. The drawback, though, is that there is now little appetite for such stars overseas. This contrasts with the heyday of Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-fat, who were stars both at home and across the world.