A comforting if bittersweet retelling of Sammo Hung’s formative years at the Peking Opera School where he plays a master mentoring his younger self, as it explores tradition and passion at the crossroads of societal and cultural change.
Review #2,790
Dir. Alex Law
1988 | Hong Kong | Drama | 112 min | 1.85:1 | Cantonese & English
PG (passed clean)
Cast: Sammo Hung, Cheng Pei-Pei, Lam Ching-Ying
Plot: This is a story about the Peking Opera School that Jackie Chan, Samo Hung and Yuen Biao attended as young men. The story is about their teacher Master Yu and his school.
Awards: Won 7 Golden Horse Awards – Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound Recording; Nom. for 2 Golden Horse Awards – Best Leading Actor, Best Supporting Actor; Official Selection (Toronto)
Distributor: Celestial Pictures
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Peking Opera School; Training & Discipline; Art Form; Master & Disciples
Narrative Style: Straightforward
Pace: Normal
Audience Type: Slightly Mainstream
Viewed: Screener (as part of Singapore Chinese Film Festival)
Spoilers: No
Alex Law may not have directed many features but he was best known for Painted Faces which he also co-wrote with his wife and fellow filmmaker Mabel Cheung.
Cheung, of course, remains the more discursively visible of the duo, having made films such as An Autumn’s Tale (1987) and The Soong Sisters (1997), but looking back at Painted Faces’ success at the 1988 Golden Horse Awards, where it swept numerous prizes including Best Feature Film and Best Director, and in light of Law’s recent passing in 2022, may prove rewarding for the nostalgists of ‘80s Hong Kong cinema.
The star of the show is Sammo Hung, playing Master Yu who early in the film is seen ‘torturing’ kids as part of discipline training.
This was a different time as the film chronicles with a strong dose of sentimentalism the story of the Peking Opera School which Hung, Jackie Chan and more would train and toil in for years before making a breakthrough in pictures.
“It takes three years to train a scholar but ten years to train an actor.”
While the meta-narrative element of the older Hung mentoring his younger self forms part of the charm of watching Painted Faces, Law doesn’t draw too much attention to that; the film instead shows the camaraderie and physical prowess of these students of opera, an art form-cum-entertainment that is unfortunately in decline.
Furthermore, a recurring theme is about the ostracisation of these ‘baldies’, who spend years training in their craft at the expense of a proper education, who must one day find that they have it in them to contribute to society in a well-meaning way, beyond the stage and performative gestures of fictive myths.
With a healthy dose of humour (that ‘free bus ride’ scene is as riotously funny as it gets) and some effectively melodramatic moments in the climax, Painted Faces is a comforting if bittersweet watch, exploring tradition and passion at the crossroads of societal and cultural change.
Grade: B+
Trailer:
Eternality Tan 