‘The Narrow Road’: Edinburgh Review

Dir. Lam Sum. Hong Kong, 2022.

Hong Kong: it’s been a while. Lam Sum’s tender, thoughtful film The Narrow Road was shot during Covid-19, but, unlike many of its ilk, uses lockdown only as a keynote to poignantly emphasise what we all know to be true: how the poor and the struggling and the very young and very old took the weight of the pandemic on their fragile shoulders. An elegy, in a way, for a director who is emigrating; a love song to his city and the low-paid labour on which it was founded,The Narrow Road builds on the odd-couple pairing of veteran Louis Cheung and newcomer Angela Yeun to deliver a subtle and affecting portrait of a difficult time in a unique place.

It’s odd that a film of this high quality doesn’t have an international sales agent on it already

World premiering at the Edinburgh Film Festival, The Narrow Road has the look of a surefire box office hit and awards candidate in Hong Kong and Asian markets - there’s nothing contentious in there, unless the hole in the heart of the city left by pervasive emigration is a challenge to watch for those who provoked it. There are no protests on these empty streets — just low-paid workers struggling to make a living as businesses shutter around them. The friendship which develops between hard-working cleaner Chak (Cheung) and his single mother neighbour-turned-assistant Candy (Yeun) would be unlikely under any other circumstance, but there are no job opportunities left in a shut-down town, so she mucks in, coating the city in a disinfectant spray whose very supply chain is threatened, wearing masks which are both expensive for, and unavailable to, the poor.

It’s worth noting, but never explicitly stated, that Hong Kong has no social security umbrella. Neither do films set in the former British-administered territory generally take the Ken Loach approach, with notable exceptions such as Jacob Cheung’s Cageman (1992). The Narrow Road is set in the tiny workers dormitories and windowless rooms of Hong Kong’s Sam Shui Po - a low-income district in which Lam finds beauty and, a kind of romance, without ever romanticising the lives of the people who live in it. Meteor Cheung’s camera roams from tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurants to body shops and brightly-lit convenience stores before, finally, looking up and out to the South China Sea, and the cranes of what was until recently the world’s second largest port.

In these places, it’s a given that you’ll work hard and retire in dignity, like Chak’s mother, who still helps him out financially with his cleaning business - while taking the odd punt on the Jockey Club horse races or the Mark 6 lottery. There’s a pervasively melancholy guitar here, which can be a little too directional. And Candy, when she first appears, is the type of over-cute, bouncy, kittenish character bedecked in day-glo costume jewellery who runs down the street hand-in-hand with her adorable young daughter. That’s just surface noise, though, on a role which grows, and a performance which has real depth. Candy’’s almost Paper Moon-like relationship with her daughter, whom she moves around between unpaid bills and low-paid jobs, is very well drawn. ”You’ll hate me when you grow up,” is a truth sadly acknowledged. Louis Cheung, meanwhile, has gravitas as a honest striver who begins to ask questions of his life that can’t easily be answered.

Death sneaks into The Narrow Road, and again, not in the usual way. The Taoist ceremony depicted underlines the very themes of sacrifice, humility and acceptance which the film is questioning - and on which Hong Kong is built.

The screenplay for The Narrow Road, which refers to the confines in which these characters work, was long in development before lockdown, and it is not a film about Covid-19. Its incorporation, though, is poignantly achieved. The references to emigration and the loss of friends and family are another, linked, sadness. Lam, whose first feature was last year’s May You Stay Forever Young, the Golden Horse Netpac winner which only secured distribution in Taiwan, flexes his muscles here with some defining imagery — the masked, suited cleaners who open his piece, the empty streets. May You Stay… addressed Hong Kong’s fight for its future directly with a story of a young protestor who threatens to commit suicide. That may not have helped Lam Sum, and it’s odd that a film of this high quality doesn’t have an international sales agent on it already. An under-the-radar Edinburgh world premiere is unsual.  

There have been many powerful documentaries made (often anonymously) about the political situation in which Hong Kong is currently mired. There have been dramas which parallel it. But they don’t get to the core of the city for the people who live and work there. In The Narrow Road, Hong Kongers have a film for them, for now, in Cantonese, face-on into the pandemic and their very uncertain future, with a lot of love in its heart, and pride for what their city is.