‘The Last Dance’: Tokyo Review

Dir/scr: Anselm Chan Mou-yin. Hong Kong. 2024. 126mins

The pandemic crippled numerous Hong Kong businesses, including the wedding planning company of 50-something Dominic (Dayo Wong). One industry that has bucked the trend is the funeral business and so Dominic stumbles into the death care industry, bringing with him a wedding planner’s sense of occasion and customer care. To succeed, he must win over his business partner: Master Man (Michael Hui), a cantankerous Taoist priest. The third film from Anselm Chan Mou-yin (Ready o/r Rot), The Last Dance combines chewy domestic drama with lighter moments exploring the unlikely friendship between slick, money-obsessed Dominic and the grumpy authoritarian priest, to appealing, if somewhat predictable, effect.

A forthright examination of the collision between tradition and feminism

The Last Dance screens in Tokyo following a world premiere at the Hawaii Film Festival and the opening slot in Hong Kong. The picture earned star Michelle Wai – a standout as Master Man’s no-nonsense paramedic daughter Yuet – Best Actress at China’s Huading Awards. Following the picture’s warm festival reception, the domestic release date was shifted forward to November 9th, and it will be released in the UK and Ireland on November 15 by Trinity CineAsia. While it’s a picture with niche appeal, the forthright examination of the collision between tradition and feminism, plus the vivid depiction of Taoist funeral rituals, could make it a title of interest for fans of contemporary Hong Kong and Chinese cinema.

Wang brings an interesting comedian’s physicality to this dramatic role. His Dominic is a man who seems angular and ill at ease, shoulders slightly bowed under the weight of the debts he has accrued. His smile doesn’t quite conceal the desperation that he feels. His girlfriend’s Uncle Ming (Paul Chun) is retiring as a partner in a funeral shop and handing his half of the business to Dominic, and throws him in at the deep end with his first assignment: assisting at a traditional Cantonese bone collection ceremony. This entails disinterring a corpse – it needs to have been buried for 6 or 7 years  – in the presence of the family and scraping the bones clean of the fibrous decayed body tissue. The unflinching camera picks out every last grisly detail. And Dominic is decidedly green around the gills by the end of the ceremony.

But he takes to the business with flair, despite a few hiccups along the way (the creation of a full-sized paper Maserati funeral offering falls flat with the family of a young man who, it turns out, was killed after he crashed a Maserati). And his relationship with the frosty Master Man starts to warm.

At this point, the focus of the film shifts away from Dominic and onto Master Man and his family. Master Man’s son Ben (Pak Hon-chu) followed the family tradition to become a Taoist priest, but he watches football on his phone during prayer rituals and was persuaded by his wife to be baptised in order to get their son into a preferred Catholic school. Yuet, meanwhile, would have happily taken over her Dad’s ceremonial robes, but for the fact that women are considered “filthy” and “repulsive” according to Taoist teachings. Yuet tries not to take it personally, but her father’s rejection of her entire sex has started to wear her down.

Conflicted, strong-willed and empathetic, Yuet is by far the most layered and complex character in the film, and the scenes in which the daughter confronts her ailing but stubborn father are highlights. Slightly less effective are the later scenes between Dominic and Master Man, who finally bond over biscuits and singing. But the film’s most distinctive element is its detailed account of funeral rituals. This throws up a few incongruous combinations – the plaintive piano score that accompanies the preparation of the partially decomposed corpse of a child, for example. But it does ensure that this world of death feels thoroughly lived in.