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Twelve Nights (2000)

December 23, 2001 • Film, Reviews

Directors: Aubrey Lam Oi-Wah
Producer: Peter Chan Ho-San

Cast:
Cecilia Cheung Pak-Chi
Eason Chan Yik-Shun
Ronald Cheng Chung-Kei
Candy Lo Hau-Yam

with Nicola Cheung Sun-Yu, Nicholas Tse Ting-Fung, Stephen Fung Tak-Lun, Su Au Suk-Jing, G C Goo-Bi, Siu Ye Jim

Country: Hong Kong

Language: Cantonese
Running Time: 91 min

12nites2Twelve Nights is a new popularly-oriented Hong Kong film with a difference: it is thoughtful, articulate, and very talky. Moreover, it is explicitly inspired by an Ingmar Bergman film: Scenes From a Marriage. Call it counter programming, or take it as an always useful reminder that the Hong Kong film industry — in full recovery mode after a couple of years in which its very survival was in doubt — is much more than an action genre movie factory.

First-time director Aubrey Lam’s new film premiered in Hong Kong in April, and has cycled through the overseas Chinese film theatres and international video disk distribution network. So far, it has escaped the notice of the film festival circuit, with the notable exception of the 2000 Pusan International Film Festival.

A romantic drama with a twist, Twelve Nights charts the rise and fall of a young couple’s love affair. Airline employee Jeannie (Cecilia Cheung) meets young businessman Alan (Eason Chan) at her birthday party, on what the film calls, in an intertitle, the “First night”. Lam drew inspiration from Bergman’s film for her screenplay’s structural conceit; but she extends the model. The film charts the development of their relationship over exactly one year through eleven more scenes, each of which is a snapshot of their affair as it develops on a different night. Each scene is preceded by a title (Second night, Third night, etc.) and an ironic aphorism (e.g. “Only people in love believe that they are fated to meet”).

See the full review in Cinemaya: Spring 2001, issue 51, pp. 22-24.

—Shelly Kraicer, A Chinese Cinema Page

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