I read a journal recently from Nan Fang Daily condemning Papa Loves You as the most perfunctory production. I think that kind of strong Hong Kong style in movie should be the obstacle for audiences from different cultures. Meanwhile, It also gains a wide acceptance in mainland China by its overflowing absurd dialogue with tearful nonsense humor custom. What is the difference? How can audiences distinguish the truth or the false, and to judge the good from the bad?

Compared to Jeff Lau's works, people will understand that any first grade creation should have genuine dialogues to be expressed inattentively by a consistent playing style. This idea has been carried through Papa Loves You. The plot talks about a father, Tony Leung Ka-Fai, who rescues his daugther, Charlene Choi. On the one hand he has completely preserved a camp style directing, while full of ramble in talk for comic relief by using jingle. For example, to make the other one wrongly giving a release order to expose the boundless obstruction of language - the hindrance between two generations which is what the film adhesively emphasized. Taking the advantage of this effect, director Herman Yau used an efficient way of evolving the discussion of the conviction of parents' love at the end of the film as a critical reverse. Although this comes to be like a child's play, it also could be said that this has stocked to the bitter end according to the main creative intention of correspondence.

Of course, viewing from the higher level, Enter the Phoenix is basically a fantasy text for creators to design the characteristics of the roles freely. And Papa Loves You, on the other hand, reflects that the genuine obstruction problem practically exists between parents and children, and the director tries to put forward a conclusion that parents should use their children's language patent (a way of expressing the admiration of triad) to create possibilities of conversations. It is its advantage when comparing that former attempts to express the void in its emptiness, while the latter presents realism in emptiness. Moreover, the law of play to be fun is a basic enquiry, which should be obeyed; otherwise the film would become an indescribable messy work.

I think that these two late films Papa Loves You and Enter the Phoenix are the good examples for illustrating the pros and cons of using the mock style when suggesting some contents as the concrete criteria for comparison. These two films have paid a lot of effort to construct the mock style by mingling with parents' love element. They construct the issue of the lack of communication between two generations by using abstraction as the point of departure. The result is highly different, the former comes to be arbitrary and artificial, but the latter does not make you laugh nor cry. You can see the good and the bad. One of the crux is whether the director considers  the harmonious effect on the whole style. To make mockery as the story's outline has innately affirmed the directing way to form a playing product, that is why Enter the Phoenix has to use doll to delivered message and the pain of last generation should be explained seriously by other part. That itself has been a style for the process of self solvent.

By Tong Ching Siu

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