(Source: G Affairs Official Youtube Channel)
Releasing in March, G Affairs grabbed the city’s attention by its satirical genre on reflecting the reality of the Hong Kong society. As the winning film in the professional group of the 3rd First Feature Film Initiative, the film is directed by Hong Kong’s new director, Lee Cheuk Pan, with only 5.5 million budget in total funded by the government.
No matter filming techniques, soundtracks, use of colours, or the promotion trailers, G Affairs appears to be a film full with Japanese style, even the choice of the main actress, Hanna Chan, herself looks like a Japanese. Yet, once you have watched the film, you will know G Affairs is an extremely ‘localised’ Hong Kong film. In this case, ‘localised’ means how close the film can connect with the current Hong Kong society. The film itself can be categorised in the suspense genre, at the same time, mixing with themes of crime, youth, romance, violence and various social problems. Such attempt is a very bold one, under the limited amount of capital and resources obtained.
The film starts by throwing out a mysterious case of police finding out the head of a corpse, without the body, in which bringing out further mysteries and secrets among the main characters. You might think that this is just a typical suspense film of spilling out the whole storyline like how the cliché film formula goes. Yet, Lee covers the story through different perspectives of various main characters as well as in inconsistent timeline. Even though several themes are included with a number of relationships between characters, the whole plot and the mysteries can be be presented logically without any bugs. It is not an easy task to handle so many elements in only an hour and forty-five minutes.
(Source: G Affairs)
An interesting thing to note in G Affairs is about its title. The letter G in the title connects the whole film and the characters’ relationships. A number of vocabularies starting with the letter G can be found throughout the film and they in fact share special meanings in contributing to the message of the film. The connections of all the G-words are rather obscure if you look at them individually, however their connections can be found once you link the words to the ending of the story. It is a smart though risky way of how the playwright leads the thoughts of the audience.
To make G Affairs being a successful low budget film, making known of the dark side of the society is the selling point of the film. No doubt that there are already hundreds of local films illustrating the seamy side of Hong Kong, the most special part of this film is that it is exposing more than one social issue in one story. It is somehow unrealistic to have that many social problems happening on only few characters. But the truth is, this is the case of Hong Kong currently. Sexual harassments, campus bullying, police violating the law, these scenes that appear in the film is actually happening in our real life at the same time. Truly reflecting the reality of Hong Kong in such a large extent makes G Affairs a more thoughtful film than other local ones.
G Affairs is no doubt a film that Hong Kong citizens should watch, no matter in support of local films, or to reflect upon the crisis happening in our homeland.