May We Chat | 1/5

SINGAPORE — Let us first start off by saying we love all things from Hong Kong: The food, the TV shows, the shopping. But May We Chat, directed by film critic Philip Yung, is everything we don’t like about the city: The triads, the compensated dating, the supposedly depraved teenage lives.

An obvious nod to David Lai’s classic 1982 film Lonely Fifteen, the story takes place in 21st century Hong Kong where the majority of the characters communicate via the application WeChat (hence the title of the movie).

The film follows three troubled teenaged girls: Chiu Wai-ying (Rainky Wai), a deaf-mute girl roped into compensated dating to help out her poor grandmother; Li Wing-yan (Kabby Hui), the daughter of a famous celebrity who resorts to casual sex and drugs for attention; and Wai-wai (Heidi Lee), who takes care of her younger sister and drug-addicted mother by working as a triad companion/escort.

The story starts with the girls’ WeChat message bubbles popping up on the screen —it’s clear they haven’t met in real life yet seemed to have formed a strong bond among themselves. Suddenly, there is news of Yan attempting suicide and mysteriously going missing, which prompts the other two to go on a search to find their misguided friend.

To find her daughter, Yan’s mother Irene (Irene Wan) enlists the help of her childhood friend Peter (Peter Mak), a has-been former triad boss. Both veteran actors were stars of Lonely Fifteen, whose clips are interposed via flashbacks and provide a surprisingly relevant parallel between the two films.

However, Yung’s desire to re-create the shock factor of the degradation of youths that Lai’s film so famously depicted is lost on the borderline sadistic scenes of sexual violence. The overtly sexual emphasis — including a shot of full-frontal male nudity — takes away from the intended purpose of the film to warn against the seedy path teenagers are prone to take. Instead, it comes across as garish, especially with the overly melodramatic soundtrack and bad lighting.

One redeeming quality of the film is that it’s shot on location in Hong Kong —whether it’s the dilapidated rooftop where Wai-ying goes to daydream, Yan’s stark-white luxury apartment, or the housing estate where Wai-wai’s triad boyfriend lives, the authentic locations provide a much needed grounding element to an otherwise airy movie.

May We Chat is a flimsy excuse to have sexually explicit scenes, with not much depth in either character development or plot points.

(TBA, 99mins)