In the last section of Close Encounters with Master Filmmakers – Movie Talks: Peter Ho-sun Chan hosted at the Hong Kong Film Archive, it is revealed that Chan had just wrapped up the latest film he worked on and caught a morning plane from Chengdu to Hong Kong to attend the talk on the same day. That upcoming film shares the same female lead, Zhou Xun, as in Perhaps Love (2005).

In the previous talks, Chan explained that Casablanca (1942) has been a huge influence on him throughout his filmmaking career. The triangle relationship among Rick (Humphrey Bogart), Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), and Victor (Paul Henreid) repeatedly appears in variations in his films like Tom, Dick & Hairy (1993), Comrades, Almost a Love Story (1996), and Perhaps Love (2005). He favours the love-hate dynamic and morally ambiguous romance, where he can see the humanity in the grey area – the selfless or selfish choice characters make in a relationship.

Musical is a rare genre in Chinese-language cinema, yet Peter Chan took this film to expand his directorial career into the bigger market in mainland China. Musical is an unfamiliar genre to Peter Chan; therefore, he set the film in a film-within-the-film structure, which Chan explained made the film easier for him to approach. The love triangle between Lin Jiandong (Takeshi Kaneshiro), Sun Na (Zhou Xun), and Nie Wen (Jacky Cheung) is a tale about the “loss of innocence” and the disappointment of misplaced love. Nie Wen casts his girlfriend Sun Na and Lin Jiandong, who is Sun Na’s ex-lover, in a film titled Forget Me Not. As filming progresses, the past relationship between Sun and Lin is revealed. Director Nie takes on one of the roles in his film, and the drama inside and outside the film starts to merge. The characters in the film-within-the-film gradually mirror the actors outside the film. The betrayal of Sun hurts both men, and both men attempt some form of revenge on Sun.

Nie can be interpreted as Victor, and Lin as Rick in Casablanca. Perhaps Love ends without a conclusion of who ends up with whom. The three people in this triangle all do things to hurt each other to fulfil personal desires – whether it’s a successful acting career, revenge for betrayal, or self-abasement. The film’s ultimate message is that perhaps love is ultimately about love of the self.

The elaborate musical sequence is achieved through Farah Khan’s choreography. Invited by Peter Chan with great sincerity, Jacky Cheung filmed the film while he was performing his own musical tour, Snow Wolf Lake. Cheung’s musical performance delivers a heartfelt resonance backed by his vocal and acting abilities. Chan believed that what makes a good musical relies more on emotional expression than vocal technique, and Takeshi Kaneshiro and Zhou Xun’s performance touches as many hearts as Jacky Cheung’s does.

Although musical is not a familiar genre for Peter Chan, he found singing to be a great tool to express the emotions of characters. Music can be more expressive and straightforward than dialogue, and this is always what he wants to achieve in his films. What may be too cheesy in plain dialogue is about right in lyrics.

In the seven screenings and talks of the programme, we gain a clearer picture of Peter Chan as a director. Born with a transnational background, his film narratives do not shy away from his personal experience. He constantly injects his life experience and philosophy into his films his own. No matter whether he makes films in Hong Kong, the United States, or Mainland China, regardless of genre and production scale, Peter Chan may not mark his films with a fixed style or narrative, but marks his films in their core values and character motivations.

Peter Chan described his filmmaking career as climbing mountains; there is always another challenge ahead of him. He also describes his career as walking on thin ice; he never knows where the next step is, or the reaction to his next work – he always floats forward uncertainly. It might be hard to believe a director as prolific as him would be insecure about himself. This constant insecurity might be his constant motivation to push himself further, to not settle, to strive for something better. He joked that it is his fate to be constantly endeavouring – his Chinese name 可辛 (Ho Sun) means “capable of diligence.” He tells the audience that this process is what he enjoys the most. He might step out of or back into his comfort zone, but every step he takes counts. What matters for him is the path that he now steps on, not the destination.

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Written by Jade Wong

Featured image © 2005 Perhaps Love

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