Bullets over Summer

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
1999

Bullets over Summer
Wilson Yip
Hong Kong, China 1999
92 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: B.I.G. Film Production Company
Executive Producer: Ivy Kong
Producer: Joe Ma
Screenplay: Matt Chow, Wilson Yip, Cheung Man
Cinematographer: Lam Wah Chuen
Editor: Cheung Ka Fai
Production Designer: Cheung Sai Kit
Sound: Ho King Man
Music: Wai Kai-leung
Principal Cast: Francis Ng, Louis Koo, Law Lan, Michelle Alicia Saram
Production: B.I.G. Film Production

As the Hong Kong film scene lumbers out of its recent hibernation, a few filmmakers are starting to emerge from the wreckage of Hollywood defections, VCD piracy and post-colonial malaise. One of the more interesting young filmmakers working today is Wilson Yip. He is making action-oriented police/gangster films with unusual genre twists which owe a great deal to Roger Corman’s most interesting work, and feature a charmingly ironic sense of humour.

Mike and Brian are two plainclothes cops in search of a gang of violent thugs who have robbed a bank and killed a few policemen. Forcing themselves into an apartment building where the suspects are supposedly hiding, they hunker down for a long surveillance. They encounter an older woman known as Granny, who suffers from memory loss and constantly confuses the two men. At times she is very generous to them, and sometimes she just wants them out of the building, which she owns. The guys also fall in love, Brian with a teenage slacker, and Mike with a pregnant single mother who owns the local laundromat.

They suspect an arms dealer in an adjacent building of chicanery, and their conflict with him provides much of the film’s comedy. It turns out he is just pretending and they all become friends. Ultimately, the gang returns to their hideout and we learn much about Granny that has eluded our heroes up to this point.

Bullets over Summer is set in an old Hong Kong neighbourhood with everyone packed in tight; the local flavour in convincingly rendered, and Yip uses the location to full advantage in the rip-snorting chase and blazing gun sequences.
—Noah Cowan