Hong Kong moviegoers continued to prove their willingness to turn out for local productions in 2024, pushing Anselm Chan’s funeral drama The Last Dance to become the most successful local film of all time at the Hong Kong box office with over $18M.
The success of The Last Dance followed Soi Cheang’s nostalgia-fueled martial arts thriller Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (Hong Kong’s Oscar submission) and its portrayal of the notorious, long-demolished Kowloon City neighborhood. There is a sustained desire, it would seem, to preserve and celebrate specific elements of Hong Kong culture which have come under threat in recent years, as the city is fast coming to resemble just another Chinese metropolis.
The Last Dance enshrines precisely the same sensibility as its recent box office predecessors, albeit in a markedly different tone. Chan’s previous features, Ready O/R Knot (2021) and its sequel Ready O/R Rot (2023), were both broad comedies. Despite casting veteran comedians Dayo Wong and Michael Hui in the leads here, The Last Dance is a notably more somber affair all round, though not without its moments of levity.
Wong stars as Dominic, a cash-strapped wedding planner whose business took a nose-dive during the pandemic. On the encouragement of his longtime girlfriend, Jade (Catherine Chau), he agrees to take over her uncle’s half of a funeral business. Dominic is quick to embrace the cosmetic similarities between the two industries, not least the opportunity to upsell grieving relatives with ostentatious ceremonial add-ons, but is given the cold shoulder by his new partner — the cantankerous old Taoist priest, ironically known as Master “Hello” Man (Hui) because of his frosty disposition.
Dominic sees his role as assisting the living, but Master Man is concerned solely with the fate of the departed. He leads the intricate Taoist ceremonies, alongside his son Ben (Tommy Chu Pak Hon), who has reluctantly followed his father into the family business. Most notable among these rituals is “Breaking Hell’s Gates” — which gives the film its original Cantonese title, and involves an elaborate display of smashing clay tiles using a ceremonial sword, in order to guarantee the deceased’s safe passage through the underworld on route to reincarnation.
Eager to expand the business, Dominic accepts an assortment of clients and indulges their occasionally questionable demands. One grieving mother has kept her dead son on ice for six months as she searched for a funeral parlor willing to mummify his body. Dominic’s overeagerness puts Man in the difficult and wholly unpleasant position of preparing a putrefied corpse. In another instance, he allows a friend of the deceased, played by Rachel Leung, to visit the body, unaware that their relationship was condemned by the rest of the family.
Where The Last Dance really comes into its own, however, is in the second half, when Chan and co-writer Cheng Wai-kei’s screenplay shifts focus away from Dominic’s rocky initiation and onto Man’s dysfunctional family, which has long been buried in a suffocating tomb of inherited closed-mindedness. Constrained by the tenets of his discipline, Man has showered decades of abuse and neglect on his own children, all in the name of respecting the teachings of his ancestors.
In addition to bullying his son, to the extent that Ben is now plotting to emigrate to Australia with his wife and son, Man has all but excluded his daughter Yuet (Michelle Wai) from the family. Forbidden from participating in Taoist rituals because of her gender, Yuet works as a paramedic, but her grueling schedule only further distances her from her family, and has led her into a number of deeply unsatisfying romantic entanglements.
As the film unfolds, Yuet increasingly becomes the center of attention, and emblematic of deep-seated misogyny and prejudice that lingers in many facets of Chinese culture and tradition. It matters not to Man that, unlike his son, Yuet has always fostered a fascination and desire for Taoist practices. The outdated teachings he follows so reverently prohibit her even from handling his ceremonial robes, because women menstruate, which is deemed to be filthy.
While Wong and Hui have been reliable performers for decades, both pivot to their more substantial, grounded roles with remarkable ease. Hui, an industry veteran of more than 50 years, today scored a Best Actor nomination from the Asian Film Awards as the stubbornly belligerent patriarch who will doubtless be recognizable, if not exactly relatable, to generations of viewers.
It is Wai, however, who is the film’s true standout. After decades of hard graft through a seemingly endless stream of romcoms and boilerplate genre fare, here she wrestles the film’s dramatic arc away from her male counterparts in order to engage with a host of compounding grievances, from the burden of filial piety to the tragic isolation of modern urban living. For the 40-year-old actress, The Last Dance feels like a genuine turning point in her career.
The same could be said of Chan. A return to the lighthearted romcoms upon which he began his career seems all-but impossible now. The Last Dance resonates with a degree of compassion and authenticity that is often sorely lacking in Hong Kong cinema. The people have spoken. Evidently, stories like these are what the city craves right now, and Chan has dutifully stepped up at a time when his community is struggling more than ever to hold onto its voice.
Title: The Last Dance
Director: Anselm Chan
Screenwriter: Anselm Chan, Cheng Wai-kei
Cast: Dayo Wong, Michael Hui, Michelle Wai, Tommy Chu Pak Hon
International Sales: Emperor Motion Pictures
Release Date: November 9, 2024 (Hong Kong)
Running time: 2hrs 6mins