Love Unto Waste (1986) User Reviews

neglected Hong Kong drama.

[Mozjoukine · 23 February 2006]

Back in the days when most major cities had at least one theatre running the current Hong Kong product, the keen movie goers could familiarise themselves with the industry's output as easily as any English language material.

By 1986 the presence of Chow Yun-fat was a flag on any production, after a string of superior efforts - STORY OF WU VIET, HONG KONG 1941, THE POSTMAN STRIKES BACK. I wandered into this one without knowing anything about it and was blown away.

It is the classic misleading exposition movie, starting like a teen romance, moving into murder mystery and ending as something more thoughtful - a contemplation of isolation.

Director Stanley Kwan later told me that Chow gave a superior performance without understanding the film. The largely unknown cast all register and the shifts of setting from the high fashion city , the trip to Taiwan with the ashes of the victim and the hospital finale are film making of a high class.

Kwan next made the exceptional ROUGE and is still on top of his game, having just turned out EVERLASTING REGRET, after a few less well judged items.

I notice that there are no comments on LOVE UNTO WASTE (not the best chosen title) which is surprising for a film of its quality and importance.

Becomes steadily more evasive and unreadable as it goes on

[philosopherjack · 20 October 2023]

The 1986 Love unto Waste, the second film by Hong Kong's great and mostly underappreciated Stanley Kwan, sounds conventional in its outline, but becomes steadily more evasive and unreadable as it goes on, the implications of its title only fully coming into focus at the very end. Tony Cheung (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) is first seen getting flamboyantly drunk at his birthday party, vomiting over young model Billie (Irene Wan), whom he nevertheless rapidly ends up dating, and through her becoming part of a quartet which also includes the actress Liu (Elaine Jin) and singer Chiu (Tsai Chin). When Chiu is brutally murdered in her apartment, detective Lan (Chow Yun Fat) enters the orbit of the remaining trio, his methods flamboyantly eccentric and unfocused (he cites Columbo as an inspiration), but rapidly seeming more interested in hanging out with them than in solving the case. The film continually muses on matters of cultural identity and self-definition, with the characters debating the meaning of a particular word, or how best to express a certain thought (it's likely that even more subtlety than usual is lost in the subtitling here), all of which intertwines with the work in progress of their personal and professional identities; when the trio takes Chiu's ashes to her family in Taiwan, and into a milieu where two of them don't speak the language, the existential investigation almost entirely displaces the criminal one. The film ends far from where it began, both narratively and tonally, with the group having dispersed, and a key character visiting another who's now dying from cancer, the two summing up their achievements and finding them wanting, marked by too much wasted time and possibility. It's an ending that puts the film's moments of joy - karaoke and drinking and laughing and smoking and flirting and cooking (a chicken inside a pig's stomach!) - in poignant, haunting perspective.