Autumn Moon

Clara Law's limpid, understated movie justifies its own poetic title by minimising plot and avoiding melodramatics; it's the flip-side of the slam-bang heroics that dominate Hong Kong cinema. An aimless Japanese private eye (Nagase, the Elvis fan from Mystery Train) catches the current autumnal mood of Hong Kong when he runs into a schoolgirl in the grip of her first crush and her dying grandmother; he has a brief sexual fling with an old flame from Japan, but nothing much else happens. The movie sees Hong Kong as a technopolis on a par with Tokyo, but regrets the waning of Chinese social and cultural traditions, and ponders the city's future in the run-up to 1997. The Brits, chasteningly, have no part to play in the film's equation.