Fruit Chan’s The Midnight After, screening in 64th Berlinale’s Panorama Special section, is an utterly disarming experience. To not only endure its 124 minutes but also fully enjoy this crazy, half-drunk ride, one has to really challenge themselves.
Chan, an independent director, screenwriter and producer from Hong Kong most recognized for his Dumplings, decided to adapt a hugely successful book elusively titled Lost on a Minibus to Taipo penned by the writer nicknamed “Pizza”, whose novel originated from an online serial and became a bestseller in Hong Kong. Not having read the original, I can only assume the writer must have had a hell of an experience riding all kinds of night minibuses in his native metropolis: the range of his inspirations easily matches, if not surpasses, the number of tastes in Cantonese cuisine.
The Midnight After (constantly confused with last year’s hit, Before Midnight, by the box-office clerks) tells a story of a bunch of passengers boarding a minibus from Mong Kok Road, Kowloon in urban Hong Kong to the more suburban Tai Po in the New Territories. Once the driver and his 16 passengers go through the Lion Rock Tunnel the world suddenly transforms and really awkward things start to happen. The usually busy city turns dead quiet and completely deserted, the protagonists – a bunch of odd characters of all shapes, beliefs and styles, but all stuck to their smart phones – gradually discover they are seemingly the only human beings left. Whatever happened, it’s far from over. Whatever it is that’s causing this – a mysterious form of magical spell, radiation, or fate; each decodes the film differently – it is still affecting them.
With their survival at stake, and mysterious deaths of the comrades piling up, their quest has a clear goal: find out what’s driving the ongoing apocalypse they all have to endure, and defeat it. In the mean time, faced with their own mortality and having lost their loved ones, the protagonists – a colorful bunch of typical Hongkong residents (played by both newcomers and well-known stars of local cinema like Kara Hui, Lam Suet, and Simon Yam) – will have to evaluate their identities and rethink their priorities and morals.
Chan’s film is a genre-swapping, luscious parade of B-movie-inspired twists, necrophiliac emo rapists, and bodies rising from the dead. Adding to the insanity are gory body dismorphias and exploding limbs smoothly combined with startling seriousness deriving from classical melodrama, and existential questions about good and evil, including, as a surplus, a reflection upon our ecosystem resonating in the background (there might have been an explosion of a nuclear plant – a clear collocation of the Fukushima disaster).
The Midnight After is a love child of all the above mentioned, with ADHD on top of it. There are many things about the film that can be completely confusing, or even at first irritating for a viewer accustomed to traditional cinema logic, especially its over-the-top characteristic, theatrical style of acting, and swift changes in mood, from drama to hysterical laughter in a blink of an eye.
To paraphrase Dante: “Abandon all habits, you who enter here. Leave all the carefully developed and fostered watching patterns behind and enjoy the ride.” In this case it’s well worth the risk. David Bowie will be your guide, the night is young, the fun potential: extremely high… and following the teachings of the film, nobody can actually know if tomorrow will come at all.
