This essay uses an analysis of Fruit Chan’s 2016 film Kill Time to reflect on the legacy of the Handover, and on the significance of its upcoming twentieth—and, later, fiftieth—anniversaries. Although Chan’s film is set in contemporary Beijing, is based on a novel by a ainland Chinese author, and at first glance appears to have little to do with Hong Kong, this essay argues that if we look beyond the film’s surface narrative, we find that the work explores a set of concerns relevant to the Handover and its legacies. Of particular interest is the sense of anticipation and anxiety that the Handover has generated, as well as the sense of potentiality and foreboding contained in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration’s guarantee that Hong Kong would enjoy a post-Handover moratorium of “fifty years without change.”
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References
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Kill Time (謀殺似水年華). Dir. Fruit Chan 陳果. Wuzhou Film Distribution and Wanda Pictures, 2016. DVD.
Lührs, Stefanie. “Wong Kar-Wai: The Privilege of Time Travelling.” Artist Interviews. Mar. 2001. Web. 31 May 2017.
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Rojas, Carlos. “On Time: Anticipatory Nostalgia in Dung Kai-Cheung’s Fiction.”The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures. Ed. Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 847–65. Print.
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