by Simon Ramshaw
Few production companies hold the same strength of trademark from its creator than Wong Kar-wai's Jet Tone Films. While many of us know the celebrated Hong Kong filmmaker for his sumptuous romantic works like “Chungking Express” and “In the Mood for Love”, his career as a producer for other directors holds some of the same trail-blazing intrigue he brought to Hong Kong cinema since the 1980s. Set up in 1991, Jet Tone Films has been responsible for funding Wong's oeuvre and has recently expanded overseas to collaborate with Japanese and Thai directors (SABU and Nattawut Poonpiriya respectively) alike. But in this period of blossoming experimentation in the 1990s, Wong set prolific Hong Kong actor Eric Kot Man-Fai a challenge to direct a project about first love, and thus, the sprawling, affectionate “First Love: Litter on the Breeze” was born.
Hitting the ground running with a freewheeling approach to its concept, Kot begins his collection of short tales by assembling scraps of shorts he pitched to Wong and enthusiastically showing them to his audience. His collaborators from the beginning are some familiar faces from Wong's golden era, particularly from “Fallen Angels”; Takeshi Kaneshiro and Karen Mok take a variety of roles, and Christopher Doyle lends his trademark frenetic lensing to each project. Yet this stretch of “Litter on the Breeze” is the one that struggles to find its feet, perhaps by design. It's a collage of failed ideas and half-baked concepts, and the way Kot assembles them together makes them feel like trailers and promotional clips for fake films that don't actually exist. He is a filmmaker refreshingly honest too; while he makes a lot of statements about how much he feels drawn to certain elements in each story, there are moments when his commentary becomes more self-deprecating and doubtful of his abilities as a filmmaker.
His interruptions of his own work begin to take a backseat as he presents the two short films that were in fact completed. The first follows a sleepwalker (Wai-Wai Lee) whose nocturnal travels take her into the path of an eccentric garbage man (Takeshi Kaneshiro) who becomes obsessed with her ethereal innocence. A strange romantic power-play ensues where the two would-be lovers constantly dodge each other's advances through performance and manipulation, and if this sort of farcical love story sounds familiar, it's because it feels very indebted to Wong's work. Wai-Wai Lee possesses some of the same bright-eyed curiosity of Faye Wong's “California Dreamin”-loving love interest of “Chungking Express”, and Kaneshiro turns in another manic puppy dog performance that's only a notch down from his live-wire role in “Fallen Angels”.
Thankfully, the direct Wong Kar-wai comparisons stop here, and what was once derivative of his most iconic work becomes much more of a unique vision. The second story sees a dissatisfied shopkeeper (Kot directing himself) run into an ex-lover (Karen Mok); all she does is order a Coke, but this triggers a paranoid episode in our pathetic hero that has some wacky consequences. He becomes obsessed with his wife's engagement ring, having nightmares of missing fingers and elusive jewelry, and his attempts to banish his ex's almost-demonic reappearance in his life take this story into some darker, more interesting places. This is less a tale about first love as it is about the twisted memories it can conjure, and Kot ventures out of his producer's stylistic shadow into somewhere more personal and expressive. A verbal reference to “A Chinese Ghost Story” plants this firmly in the realm of magical realism, and a ridiculous swordfight sees the old flames go face-to-face in a sequence more reminiscent of a wuxia set-piece in a modern setting. This is the most successful movement in “Litter on the Breeze”, drawing out some complicated gender politics in an odd snapshot of middle-aged ennui tipping over into a full-blown crisis.
The movie's coda gives a warm and open statement from its director, whose doubts about his filmmaking credentials and abilities remain as he reflects on the process of collaborating with two giants of Hong Kong cinema. The first loves he explored in this project were a mixed bag and he knows it, but his tearful words in the film's closing moments bring this disparate, inconsistent work to a close by declaring cinema his first true love. As a tour through Kot's eagerness to experiment and improvise as a moviemaker, “First Love: Litter on the Breeze” is a kind-hearted and fun-loving experience, and even if it can occasionally feel like a B-side to Wong Kar-wai's more iconic work, it remains an interesting chapter in the ongoing history of Jet Tone Films.
