Strange Pleasures: Spacked Out
Column
Strange Pleasures: Spacked Out
Spacked Out (2000)
The teenage girls in Lawrence Lau’s Spacked Out (2000) smoke, steal, smuggle, and screw—then come home to cramped bedrooms decked out in Hello Kitty swag. Mom isn’t home—she never is. Or maybe she’s spiraling in the other room, too absorbed in her own anxieties to mind the boy you’re leading straight to the bottom bunk. Think Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) with a sprinkle of VÄ›ra Chytilová’s Daisies. The girls in Spacked Out are aimless but, together, they make something beautifully, tragically chaotic out of simply pulling through life in one piece.Â
At the time of Spacked Out’s release, Hong Kong cinema was undergoing a transition period: the rise of film pirating had upended the market, while the handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China had caused a talent drain that aggravated the industry’s already precarious economic state. Theater attendance was down and many veteran directors had difficulty obtaining funding. One fortuitous outcome of these developments was the rise of independent filmmakers interested in the marginalized inhabitants of Hong Kong—the immigrants, junkies, drop-outs, and broken families that resided in the poorer sections of the region. The gritty hardships of urban life and the toxic influence of triad networks on young people had been recurring topics in Hong Kong cinema since the early ’80s (Lau seemed particularly attuned to this phenomenon; see his 1988 debut Gangs, in which two brothers are coerced into a life of crime; or his 1990 follow-up Queen of Temple Street, in which Sylvia Chang plays a brothel madam). Yet post-Handover films like Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong (1997) and Yu Lik-wai’s Love Will Tear Us Apart (1999) were distinct for their social realist narratives and documentary style methods.Â
Spacked Out falls in with this crew. Produced on the cheap by Milkway Image, Johnnie To’s newly established production company (formed in part as a response to the flailing industry), Spacked Out was shot in two weeks on the streets of Tuen Muen, a lame, lifeless Hong Kong satellite city situated between Kowloon and the Chinese border. A gang of four 13-to-16-year-olds shoot the shit at karaoke bars, lounge in the underbellies of suspended highways, and whip out box-cutters against rival groups they encounter at the mall. Banana (Angela Au Man-si) leans into the Lolita look. At school she’s constantly on her bulky flip phone, chatting openly with her phone sex clients. Her hustle runs deep—she’s also an electronics mule, smuggling cell phones into the mainland. Sissy (Christy Cheung) is another shameless flirt but she’s committed to Bean Curd (Maggie Poon), a butch dealer with a shaved head and a loud mouth. The two lovers are on the rocks; Sissy has no interest in deflecting male attention, and each time Bean Curd catches her in a compromising situation, hell is unleashed upon the hapless male suitor. Yet even as the film depicts girls gone wild with a startling frankness and plastic playfulness, it never feels glamorous or exploitative because Lau is dead-sober about the sad realities that frame their lives. Hookups take place in derelict buildings and family homes that look more like squatting grounds; and the high of a first kiss is brought down by the horrific realization that a friend a few feet away has overdosed.
Spacked Out (2000)
Cookie (Debbie Tam), the most introverted of the four, is the burning heart at the film’s core. In the opening scene, she’s at home, wondering if her mother will ever return her calls; dreaming about her closest companion, Mosquito, who’s been shipped off to boarding school for her rebellious ways. Her boyfriend, a triad crony, isn’t answering her calls, either—he’s off selling bootleg VCDs in Mong Kok, the busiest shopping district of Hong Kong. Cookie has long suspected her beau’s a hack, but she really needs to tell him that she’s pregnant.Â
High on the minds of Hong Kong directors at the time was the perceived failure of the government in caring for its marginalized youth—uneducated, unemployed, and abandoned kids left vulnerable to triad seduction. Spacked Out is unique as a kind of feminist counter to the stylized crime thrillers that often took these youth corruption scenarios as their point of departure. Cookie radiates loneliness; it’s in her forlorn gaze; in the way she so easily drifts into solemn introspection in the middle of a rowdy hang. Neglected by her parents and her boyfriend, Cookie dreams about her bestie—who seems to symbolize a still-unspoiled childhood—and experiences frenzied visions of an abortion clinic that may or may not be the same one she eventually visits. Only her girlfriends bring her relief. Several of them have undergone the procedure dozens of times, and, instead of talking about it with the hushed apprehension we usually get in movies about teen abortions (especially in America), the girls are refreshingly blasé. You’re just too young, each one reiterates in their own way, casually but with a blunt matter-of-factness. Throughout the film we see the girls cashing in on various shady gigs, money they donate unblinkingly to Cookie’s cause. Sisterhood is all they have. Startling as it may be to see teenagers fast-tracked into such a reckless adulthood, the girls’ treatment of abortion provides a morsel of reassurance. They’re young but remarkably lucid about the conditions of their own lives.
Spacked Out manages to balance the palpable thrill, the humor even, of such an unhinged existence with the anxiety and horror of its underpinnings. Dressed in trendy Japanese fashions and strutting about like pouty Mean Girls, there’s an audacious kind of joy in their performance-as-armor, even if tightrope walking without a safety net means sometimes that armor is not enough. Cookie imagines an alternative in the older girl she idolizes, whom she overhears listing her accomplishments to a study abroad coordinator—she’s led the kind of life that could get her out of here. If Lau’s film isn’t exactly a hard denunciation of forsaken young folks—the pleasure and satisfaction in some of the girls’ eyes is too apparent—it does create room for something perhaps more stinging: the desperation and yearning behind these same passionate gazes.
Beatrice Loayza is a writer and editor who contributes regularly to The New York Times, the Criterion Collection, Artforum, 4Columns, and other publications.
Spacked Out (2000)
