Somebody’s Watching me
BY
Nick Pinkerton
On Patrick Tam’s Hong Kong New Wave watershed Nomad (1982).
Nomad opens at Metrograph on Friday, January 26 as part of Days of Being Wild: Leslie Cheung.
It is a peculiar irony that a quite a few of the landmark films of Hong Kong cinema, an enduring point of pride for the one-time British colony and an achievement of Chinese culture worthy to stand alongside Tang dynasty poetry and the Dujiangyan irrigation system in Sichuan, are explicitly concerned with the insupportable awfulness of life in Hong Kong, and the imperative (and frequent seeming impossibility) of making a clean break from the Fragrant Harbor. The expressed desire or active attempt to clear out of Hong Kong once and for all is a staple of Hong Kong cinema in films as diverse as Tsui Hark’s Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind (1980) and Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong (1997), describing the lives of no-hope youths in the city’s warren-like housing estates; diaspora melodramas like Mabel Cheung’s An Autumn’s Tale (1987) and Peter Chan’s Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996), in which immigrants in the New World fail to leave Hong Kong entirely behind them; and “heroic bloodshed” staples like John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986) and Ringo Lam’s Full Alert (1997), in which the best laid of escape boat exits never seem to come off as planned.
Patrick Tam’s Nomad, released two years after Hark’s controversial cri de couer, has more in common with that film and Chan’s than the others named above, in that its central characters are young Hong Kongers stifled by city life, but distinguishing Tam’s film is the fact that these youths come from a diversity of class backgrounds. Louis (Leslie Cheung) is the sexually inexperienced, suspiciously effeminate son of an absentee shipping magnate living in a swank seaside condo with his young stepmother, plastering his bedroom walls with Bowie ephemera and palling around with cousin Kathy (Pat Ha), whose geometrically perfect coiffure suggests she comes from similarly comfortable circumstances. Both, eventually, pair off with lovers from a few rungs further down the socioeconomic ladder—Louis with Tomato (Cecelia Yip), a headstrong and slightly flighty girl with a frizzy perm who initiates him into the mysteries of eros, Kathy with Pong (Kent Tong), whom she meet-cutes upon shucking him of his swim trunks at the public pool where he’s lifeguarding—and together they form a quartet, united by their dream of another life beyond the suffocating metropolis that constitutes their known world.
Nomad (1982)
A keen feel for the lack of privacy that characterizes urban life, especially for the young and dependent, as well as the consequent necessity of exhibitionism, colors much of Tang’s film. All of Hong Kong appears a stage in Nomad, and one with an eager audience always at hand. A gaggle of giggling girls bears witness to Pong’s humiliating de-panting, and subsequently to his confrontation of Kathy for stealing the aforementioned trunks at the record shop Louis works at, where Pong plants a swoonily theatrical kiss on her in the proscenium arch of the shop vitrine, and Kathy, in a moment of coup de théâtre showmanship, stops the ensuing brawl between Louis and Pong by whipping off her skirt, posing imperious and half-exposed on the top of a parked car. When Pong attends a fraught meeting with the family of a girl impregnated by his 12-year-old brother, a peanut gallery of neighborhood urchins cluster outside to gander at the ensuing knockabout comic melee. In another sequence, begun as broad comedy before turning to pure carnal lyricism, Pong attempts an assignation with Kathy at the apartment where he lives with his family; after a series of incidents of preemptive coitus interruptus ending definitively with an impromptu mah-jongg game spilling into the flat, the two take to the street, allowing their long-simmering attraction to boil over on one of the city’s famous double-decker trams, bound towards the evocatively named neighborhood of Happy Valley. (Later, Pong will ask Louis to guess where he and Kathy “made it” last night, suggesting that these public frolics have become a habit.) Louis’s consummation with Tomato occurs when, having chivalrously tucked her away in a hot-sheet motel he’s paid for following her eviction by an irate ex-, he ducks back into her chamber to avoid being spotted by his family’s servant, who is settling in with a girl of his own, with Louis falling into Tomato’s eager arms as he does. (Washing her meagre wardrobe at a laundromat, Tomato has no hesitation in stripping to a bikini for the length of the spin cycle.)
A fervent admirer of Nagisa Ōshima’s 1976 In the Realm of the Senses, Tam was an innovator in screen depictions of sexuality in Hong Kong cinema, his prime-time television drama Miu Kam-fung, a portrait of an unfulfilled housewife seeking satisfaction from strangers that aired the same year Oshima’s film was released, being credited as containing the first sex scenes shot for local TV. And as was the case with Tsui, whose Dangerous Encounters was gouged severely by censors, Tam’s taboo-busting did not go without notice; per The Queer Encyclopedia of Film and Television, a scene in Nomad of Cheung “clad only in underwear, fondl[ing] himself while talking on the telephone with his mother” was re-shot with the actor wearing slacks, and upon the film’s release a group of 180 teachers and headmasters signed a petition for further cuts to the movie or its total removal from circulation. (The offending shot does not resurface in Tam’s Director’s Cut, which premiered at the Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy, in 2023, the changes to which involve much reshuffling of scenes in the first reel, and the inclusion of additional material concerning Pong’s raucous, cramped lower middle-class home life, more sharply contrasted to the placid privilege of Louis’s.)
Nomad (1982)
“I like the freedom of young people in Harajuku,” Tomato tells a Japanese visitor, referring to the popular nightlife and shopping district in Tokyo; Hong Kong, she informs him, is “too crowded.” To this he very sensibly replies that Tokyo actually has three million more people than Hong Kong—but statistics couldn’t mean much to these Hong Kongers for whom, as is often the case with those afflicted with naïve yearning, the Real World is always waiting to be found somewhere other than where fickle fate has happened to put them. (Across the border in the Mainland metropolises of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, undoubtedly, one could find aimless youths for whom Hong Kong was the cosmopolitan Promised Land.) The ubiquity of Japanese culture in Hong Kong—which Tam freely admits was exaggerated in the film—is a recurring motif. A poster in the record shop window announces a “Japanese Invasion” of city pop stars; Kathy treats Louis to her version of a kabuki dance; and Louis, a fashion student, has an Issey Miyake bag in his room, venerates Japanese designers, huffs imported lighter fluid in imitation of Shinjuku slackers, and sings the praises of Kinji Fukasaku’s Shogun’s Samurai, a 1978 “Sonny” Chiba vehicle. (As to influences from further abroad, the presence of Bowie seems almost a commentary on the somewhat androgynous stage and screen persona of Cheung, here in his breakthrough film role, and elsewhere Louis is seen, significantly, reading Nietzsche—Tam credits the philosopher’s “depiction of youthful energy” in his 1882 The Gay Science as a major inspiration on his film.)
The visitor from Japan (Yung Sai-kit), the fifth wheel who will imbalance the foursome of Louis, Kathy, Tomato, and Pong, has ample reason to harbor no nostalgia for the Land of the Rising Sun: he is a refugee seeking shelter, a defector from the Japanese Red Army—the militant communist organization responsible for a number of terror attacks beginning with the Lod Airport massacre that killed 26 in Tel Aviv on May 30, 1972—who has been marked for death by his former comrades. The group fantasize of finding a safe passage to the Arabian Peninsula on one of Louis’s father’s boats, which lends the film its title, but first set sail for Lantau Island in the New Territories, Hong Kong’s largest and least-populated island. This opens a sequence in which Tam offers up an exceedingly lovely vision of bucolic bliss and lassitude: a lone yellow umbrella on the seashore that recalls the cover of Neil Young’s 1974 On the Beach; Louis resting his head against Tomato’s bare navel, just above the elastic of her panties; scenes of the city kids sleeping together outdoors, a tangle of sweat-damp limbs, in a tent of mosquito netting gently stirred by the breeze. (Tam’s dynamic, strikingly colorful images can simultaneously recall aspects of classic Chinese painting and contemporary pop art, and in these and other lavish scenes of languorous ennui amidst consumerist status symbols, he suggests an affinity to David Hockney.)
This idyll, whose Edenic quality is emphasized in a moment where Pong models a “fig leaf” over his groin, will be jarringly interrupted with the arrival of Red Army agents come to get their man, a bloody climax of innocence under attack that suggests the English-language title of Tam’s previous feature, 1981’s Love Massacre. What we’ve seen to be true of urban Hong Kong is true in this remote outpost as well: the modern world is too small and too crowded to disappear in, and any escape is, at best, temporary and illusory.
Nomad (1982)
Tam himself managed several flights from his hometown, before finally returning: Love Massacre was shot in part in Los Angeles, he spent a stint in Berkeley devouring the programming at the Pacific Film Archive, and for a time he was headquartered in Malaysia, where he labored to build the groundworks for a more robust local Chinese-language cinema in a country with a significant ethnically Chinese population. Along with Tsui, Ann Hui, and Tim Yo, Tam is generally considered one of the key figures of the first Hong Kong New Wave. Like them, he had his beginnings in television, starting work at Hong Kong Television Broadcasts Limited (HK-TVB), a hotbed of experimentation under director Selina Chow, in 1967, the year of the station’s founding. Tam steadily made his way up the ranks, rising to the role of director by 1975, working frequently in collaboration with screenwriter Joyce Chan, later author of scripts for Love Massacre, Nomad, and Hui’s 1979 feature debut The Secret, among others. Tam’s television corpus, consisting of 24 shot-on-16mm telefilms for HK-TVB’s Film Unit, who specialized in Cantonese language dramas, is terra incognita to English-speaking cinephiles, but tantalizingly discussed by scholar Esther C.M. Yau in a chapter of the book Hong Kong Screenscapes, her description of their “urban characters… parad[ing] their individualist and sexual selves on the small screen” suggesting that the concerns of Nomad were very much in place in his earlier work.
Like Tsui, Hui, and Yo, Tam’s early films infused Hong Kong pop cinema with elements of European modernism, with Tam having first been drawn to figures like Jean-Luc Godard—whose compositional use of blank space left a palpable impact on his work, and to whom he dedicated Miu Kam-fung—thanks to the writing of critic Law Kar in the Chinese Student Weekly. Unlike his better-known contemporaries, though, Tam had difficulty comfortably adapting himself to the mandates of the Hong Kong film industry which, for all its virtues of vivacious brio and on-the-fly ingenuity, has always remained ruthlessly commerce-minded. Tam, a self-critical perfectionist and an enormously erudite man who peppers interviews with references to Robin Wood and Noël Burch—the latter whose 1973 Theory of Film Practice he credits with inspiring the editing of his first film, The Sword (1980)—has directed exactly one feature since 1990. Now an éminence grise of 75, Tam’s influence is much wider than his relatively slim filmography would suggest, thanks in large part to his relationship with the screenwriter of his 1987 Final Victory, director-to-be Wong Kar-wai. In addition to editing two of Wong’s films, 1990’s Days of Being Wild and 1994’s Ashes of Time, both starring Cheung, it was Tam who first gave Wong’s invaluable collaborator William Chang Suk-ping a job as production designer and art director, on Love Massacre; without the influence of both men—Tam’s focus on urban anomie and seething sexuality, Chang’s genius for creating environments that lend themselves to images of iconographic punch—one of the most beloved bodies of work in Hong Kong cinema is difficult to imagine.
This is not to reduce Tam to a mere trial run for Wong, a John the Baptist to his Nazarene, or an epigone to acknowledged masters like Ōshima and Godard—in the best of his work, Tam’s regional specificity and personal idiosyncrasies make him very much an artist unto himself, a chronicler of love and death in an age of consumerist fantasy. In later interviews, around the release of his 2006 “comeback” After This Our Exile, Tam would criticize his earlier features for committing the cardinal sin of style over substance, uncomprehending of the fact that this was precisely the correct tack to take on a film like Nomad: a portrait of affluent, uneasy youth, in all their valor and all their vapidity.
Nick Pinkerton is a Cincinnati-born, Brooklyn-based writer focused on moving image-based art; his writing has appeared in Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Artforum, Frieze, Reverse Shot, The Guardian, 4Columns, The Baffler, Rhizome, Harper’s, and the Village Voice. He is the editor of Bombast magazine, editor-at-large of Metrograph Journal, and maintains a Substack, Employee Picks. Publications include monographs on Mondo movies (True/False) and the films of Ruth Beckermann (Austrian Film Museum), a book on Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Fireflies Press), and a forthcoming critical biography of Jean Eustache (The Film Desk). The Sweet East, a film from his original screenplay directed by Sean Price Williams, premiered in the Quinzaine des Cinéastes section of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, is currently playing selected US cinemas, and opens in wide release February 9.
Nomad (1982)
