Film Review: The Secret -The lost of HK localisation in Barbara Wong's film

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The secret is directed and playwright by Barbara Wong, is about a man who successfully made his ghost wife came back, it addresses about the love relationship, not only romantic but friendship and family. Auteur theory denotes that director has their own individual style and professional direction in their story. (Truffaut,1986)

Barbara Wong’s style focuses on women perspective, and recently she changed from local to china HK corporation way in producing her film.

Barbara Wong as an HK director was famous for producing women prospective film. In 1999, she went back to Hong Kong to produce her first film in the HK film industry, her first movie in HK was《女人那話兒》, it was a documentary, address about woman’s perspective about the man, relationship and how they view on sex. Afterward, she continues to direct film address young generations’ romantic relationship.  Barbara Wong not only implies the ideas of women perspective, also in her films she addresses the political atmosphere in Wonder Women, to the recently love romantic story, Break Up Club, The Girls,  also address the issues of how women view the love relationship.

In The Secret, the director has implied some changes in her filming style, no longer focus on women angle, but also from a men’s perspective to start the story.

In The Secret, it was divided into different session, first take the audience to view the story from Leon Lai’s perspective, in the middle part, the audience’s focus then move to the Wang Luo Dan’s angle, about how she deal with the facts that she may die already, the  love relationship between her and Leon Lai, after that the angle changed back to Leon Lai again, to address about the father and son relationship.

Indeed, since The Girls, Barbara Wong starts to focus on other relationships like family and friend.

After HK returned to China, HK film industry has co-corporation with China film industry. Only small director choose to continue on the local path, many choose to corporate with China investor to target the bigger market. ‘Hong Kong media claimed that Hong Kong film was dead.’(Peng,2015,P.123). Barbara Wong also chooses the way to film HK China co-corporation, like The Stolen Year, The Girls to address china market, Barbara audit Chinese actors and actress, after the success of The Stolen year, Barbara continues to produce films involved Chinese, Taiwanese, and HK actors, to target  and favour these three places  market. In The secret, Wang Luo Dan is Mainland Chinese, Leon Lai is a famous HK celebrity, JJ Lin is a Taiwanese. Recently in co-production film, the actress list was the similar combination.  In Barbara film, the story background no longer localizes, but always happened in China.

My first Barbara Wong films and my favorite one was Break Up club, focus on young teenagers’ love perspective, and also try to experimentally imply self-videoing, a very new element in the year of 2010. However, in recent Barbara Wong film, it is hard to find that localize, simple love story anymore, but full of complicated, Mainland Chinese cityscape, the local value and idea were hard to find again in her film.

 References:

Peng W, 2015, China, Film Coproduction and Soft Power Competition, Queensland University of Technology
Truffaut F, 1986,The 400 Flows, Random House USA Inc,P.121-134