New York: Kino Lorber, Inc., 2020. 1 online resource (83 min.). In English and Cantonese with English subtitles.
Something quite unexpected has happened over the past decade: Hong Kong, the city of glamour and conspicuous consumption, has morphed into a political battlefield. Within Mainland China and Hong Kong, it was always the North that was claimed to be both cultural and political—with Beijing as its epicentre—and the South, be it Shanghai or Hong Kong, that was considered prone to shopping, glamour, and pleasure. Things have changed slowly but gradually since that rainy Tuesday in 1997, July 1, when the British handed over their rule to Beijing. At that time, Hong Kong’s pop culture still flourished; its sound of Cantopop mesmerized not just the people from Hong Kong, but also those in Taiwan and the Mainland. Hong Kong was cool, hip, and trendy. But even then, there was an undercurrent of discontent, that came to the fore every year on June 4, to commemorate the Tiananmen protests. Since the handover, another date was added to the itinerary of demonstrations: July 1.
Just a year before the handover, a 19-year-old girl from Montreal, Denise Ho, flew back to Hong Kong, where she had lived until the age of 11. She was there to join the New Talent Singing Awards. She won, and got into contact with her idol, the diva of Cantopop, Anita Mui. It marked the start of her career as a celebrated pop singer, first under the stage name HoCC, later simply as Denise Ho. In Becoming the Song we get an intimate portrait of Ho’s musical career, with beautiful footage of her older spectacular concerts that are creatively reminiscent of Anita Mui’s extravagant spectacles. The documentary thus brings back memories of a Hong Kong when its sound still mattered so much regionally; it presents a musical and visual biography of the city’s pop culture. With the passing away of Anita Mui in 2003, it was not just a star who vanished, but the demise of Cantopop itself, as some observers call it.
But of course Cantopop has many afterlives. We see how Denise Ho, in certain ways, continued her mentor’s career, and staged mega shows, where the visual was as important as the sonic, if not more; where the performers would change outfits, outrageous and probably outlandish to Western eyes, several times during one show—performances that are in all aspects larger than life itself. Denise Ho became a true star, not just in Hong Kong, but also in Mainland China and Taiwan. Looking back, Denise claims that she is less proud of these years. As I watched the documentary with three friends from Hong Kong, all four of us were nonetheless mesmerized by such spectacular extravaganzas. They also somehow feel nostalgic, as if in today’s Hong Kong, such cheerful play with sound and image seems futile. In the performances she sang about freedom, about liberty, about resistance, tropes that became part of the slogans in real life a decade later.
In the documentary, we see how Denise Ho moves from an extravagant star to a singer-songwriter. And with that new image comes a different persona: more engaged and engaging, more political, and more personal. In 2012 she came out publicly as lesbian, thereby aligning herself with the queer culture of Hong Kong. A daring move, particularly in Hong Kong and the Chinese cultural context, where a poisonous mix of UK-imported Victorian values in tandem with Confucian family ideology produces a quite hostile environment for LGBTQ+ cultures. During the 2014 umbrella protests she teamed up with Anthony Wong, another equally glamorous pop star from Hong Kong, who also features prominently in the documentary. Wong came out as a gay man in 2012.
This alignment between pop culture, queer culture, and political protest makes Williams’ documentary a unique entry to grasp Hong Kong’s current situation. It shows how sexual politics can morph into street protests that aspire to political change. It shows how the deeply commercial sound of pop holds potential for resistance, a privilege often stereotypically reserved for rock music. It was a costly move for Denise Ho (as well as Anthony Wong): she cannot perform in the Mainland anymore, and has lost plenty of money-making opportunities, performing invitations, as well as audience. As such, this documentary explores new terrain; it offers an entry into the pop culture of Hong Kong that remains often unnoticed, as it is all too often perceived as a bleak copy of Western pop. Becoming the Song makes such a dismissive position no longer tenable.
One critique of the documentary may well be the somewhat neat and tidy narrative, the cliché, some would say, where the West is celebrated as a source of creativity, freedom, and democracy, and Hong Kong as a Westernized place now under threat of Beijing suppression. Whereas the latter is clearly going on, at a quite unprecedented speed, some more reflection on the dogma “the West is the Best” would have been a welcomed supplement to the current version. As many commentators have pointed out, the former British colonizers never cared much about democracy or freedom themselves during their 150 years of rule.
That said, the journey of Denise Ho marks the journey of a city. The footage of the umbrella protest radiates hope, a sense of becoming that is mapped onto yellow umbrellas. The time of camping on the streets of Mong Kok and Central shows how one can put a city on hold, and turn the street into a playground and battleground. And Denise Ho decided to be part and parcel of that battle. The images of the 2019 protests are grimmer, intensified, more black than yellow, hope morphing into anger and despair. When watching the documentary in 2021, we get the sense of moving further away from the hope that propelled the Umbrella Movement. Right now, it is not even thinkable to gather like that. Many protesters have either fled or have been jailed. Only two years later, the images of the 2019 protests already feel nostalgic, reminders of a time when this was still possible. The same goes for Denise Ho’s intense involvement and ambassadorship for the movement at, for example, the United Nations. These feel like traces of a struggle that has been abruptly silenced by enhanced political repression as well as the virus that came along. The perseverance of Denise Ho, her attempts to continue to reach out, to perform, to gain momentum for her ideas—these are like rays of light that tell us it may well be pop stars, rather than or in addition to politicians, who work towards an alternative. If only the world would listen better. Watching this documentary is an important step in that direction, in demanding us to rethink politics and pop.
Thanks to Yvette Wong, Simpson Tse, and Tommy Tse for watching and discussing the documentary with me.
Jeroen de Kloet
University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam