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A sad song of frustration and disappointment, pitched somewhere between Fruit Chan’s Handover films and early Tsai. “The doctor concluded, death by bad luck.” Four Mainlanders trying to make something of themselves in 1997 Hong Kong, Jia’s DP making his own directorial debut as an observational exercise in all the ways late-modern society forces us to intersect with one another without actually touching. Dreamy Teresa Tang ballads are like the song of some past plenitude, some memory of a world a little more coherent and fulfilling; the characters here, of course, are more often stuck with the far drearier sounds overwhelming their screens and dingy hangouts. When even the Chinese soldiers suddenly appeared on the island seem bored while doing their maneuvers without any actual purpose (“It doesn’t matter, just do your job”); lives equally banal and desperate, when doing whatever it takes to get by is enough to make one wonder what the point of getting by even is. “Death by bad luck, what is it? It’s insulting to the victim!”
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