As Hong Kong’s kung fu movie legends fade from limelight, they fear there is no one able or willing to carry on the tradition.
Kara Wai Ying-hung has brought the curtain down on a glittering career as a martial arts movie star, but not before delivering a parting elbow to the jugular about the way the genre is being treated today.
“This is my last action movie,” she said in an interview during the 21st Busan International Film Festival. “Another chance might not come and physically I just can’t do it anymore. I’m too old and too scared I’ll get hurt.
“It is a bit sad but I am someone who grew up in a different era. The way films are made today doesn’t feel as real to me and there are times when I wish people would put in the same kind of effort we did.”
Wai’s run of starring roles dates back to the heydays of Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers hit factory in the 1970s, and to the golden era of her craft. While her latest film won’t rank with the classics, it certainly harks back to those heady days.
In Mrs K, which premiered in Busan and is set for an Asian roll-out in the new year, the 56-year-old Wai stars as a mother whose shady past catches up with her, and who is drawn once more into a fight for her family and for survival.
It’s a wild and for the most part entertaining mash-up of genres that doffs its cap to the realistic style of those Shaw Brothers epics, as well as the westerns of Robert Aldrich (The Last Sunset), and its Malaysian-born director Ho Yuhang never really lets his star stray from the focus of the cameras.
If Wai was hankering for one final workout before giving up on the action capers for good, she certainly gets its in Mrs K, playing off against – and often going toe-to-toe with – Simon Yam Tat-wah as the scenery-chewing villain of the piece.
Wai was among the superstars at Shaw Brothers, beginning with her breakthrough in Challenge of the Masters (1976) and culminating in the best actress prize at the first Hong Kong Film Awards for the action-comedy My Young Auntie (1982).
Ho – only four years old when Wai got her first break – was the one who resurrected her career, casting her in his acclaimed drama At The End of Daybreak (2009). The role as a mother dealing with her troubled son helped remind the industry of her talents and she’s been in demand ever since.
Ho said he’d spent five years working on a screenplay that he hoped would pay fitting tribute to “an icon of martial arts.”
A fitting tribute also, perhaps, to a lost era of Asian filmmaking.
“Back then we were actors but we also trained just like we were martial artists. It was real. No cheating”
“These days the actors don’t really need to know everything about martial arts because there are so many fast cuts when filming, and so many tricks filmmakers can use to make things look real,” Wai said.
“It doesn’t look as real because it’s not real.
“Back then we were actors but we also trained just like we were martial artists … audiences could see that in the films that we made. It was real. No cheating.”
“We often only did one take in one day,” she said. “Now you can do 20 – and because of the money being spent you have to!
“I hope there are filmmakers ahead who will spend more time making films that feel more real when it comes to the action.”
tsangwinglun 