I must have first seen this one back in the VHS days, though it left almost no impression. My proper look at it came around 2000, on a summer afternoon broadcast on Liaoning TV.
It wasn't originally on my list of films to revisit. I added it because I wanted to remember Ng Man-tat.
Why wasn't it on the list? Because it's too famous. And honestly, I've never much cared for Andy Lau, or for romance films. Above all, I hated "Grey Traces." In junior high there were kids shaking people down at the school gate, and the one who always singled me out liked to hum that line about dragging a whole body of hardship, regret and sighs behind him. Hate the song, hate the film that used it — so A Moment of Romance never stood much of a chance with me. The song turns up early, right around the first time Andy Lau gets Wu Chien-lien into his car.
This was Wu Chien-lien's debut. Johnnie To, producing, picked her out of a pile of photographs when she was still a student and a singer. She isn't the conventionally gorgeous type, but she has a flavor that's entirely her own. She was also, for a time, one of the go-to actresses of her era — by the 1990s nearly every leading Hong Kong actor except Jackie Chan and Jet Li made a film with her. At twenty she was fresh-faced and lovely, and that silent, tear-filled look of hers moved a great many lovelorn viewers. She picked up several nominations over the years and ended up with no trophy to show for any of them.
Love? Call it Stockholm syndrome and be done with it.
Andy Lau is thoroughly ordinary here. The young Lau simply had no acting to speak of — but he was handsome, and apparently that was enough.
It was also Benny Chan's directorial debut. Before this he had spent a long stretch as Johnnie To's assistant. The film was planned by three directors — Wong Jing, Johnnie To and Ringo Lam — any one of whom could have handled it. But because the script called for a great deal of driving, To proposed that Chan, a car enthusiast, take the chair while he himself produced. That's how an action-romance that swept across East Asia came into being. Chan carried out his assignment as a useful instrument and walked out of it onto the road to being a name director. Not a terribly big name, admittedly — like Wu Chien-lien, plenty of nominations, no wins.
What the film really is, is a stew: action, explosions, car chases, romance. Nothing in it is clearly the strongest element. What stays with you are the driving scenes. Andy Lau and Wu Chien-lien have roughly three or four scenes about getting into the car, and each one has different dialogue and a different dynamic — maybe that's what the director was after. Whether I actually caught what he meant is another question. Not catching it is its own way of watching.
When Law Dai-yau's theme music comes up, that's the signal that the meat of the scene has arrived. In the film the song goes by another name, "No Regret in Youth." Half a year after release, Sanmao died, and Lo Ta-yu changed four lines of the lyric in her memory. Only from then on was the song truly "The Dream Chaser."
But the main thing I want to talk about is Ng Man-tat. When this was shot, he and Stephen Chow were just about to make the move from television into film. All three of the film's planners were old TVB hands, and so was Ng. This project was a way of testing the water. Ng plays Andy Lau's underling, a timid small-time hood who scrapes a living watching and washing other people's cars, and who ends up, out of loyalty, putting a knife in the villain's back on Lau's behalf. Ng wrings every drop out of that combination — cowardly, but a man of his word. It was for this film that he won the only award of his career. In some ways Best Supporting Actor is harder to win than Best Actor: the field is full of future leading men who haven't broken through yet (Tony Leung in 1988), established leads dropping in for a cameo (Andy Lau in 2008), or leading men past their peak (Ti Lung in 2000). Actors who dedicate themselves to supporting work rarely get the chance to carry a film. Wu Fung appeared in more than a hundred movies and worked all his life without ever landing so much as a nomination.
The villain deserves a mention too. Wong Kwong-leung, one of the "Four Great Villains," has real presence — no weaker than Ng Man-tat, and several times better than Andy Lau. But he's a typecast actor, and being good at playing a bad man is simply expected of him.
