Dir. Lawrence Lau
2000, Hong Kong, 90 min
Cantonese with English subtitles
Set in the massive, crumbling urban developments in Hong Kong’s New Territories with a combination of trained actors and nonprofessionals, Spacked Out depicts a few tumultuous days in the lives of four schoolgirls, filled with desultory mall outings, classroom phone sex, and the occasional box-cutter brawl. A study of the everyday hope and despair experienced by Hong Kong’s dead-end kids that stands alongside Tsui Hark’s Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind (1980) and Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong (1997), here focusing attention on young working-class women. Swimming in turn-of-century malaise, this youth drama offers a slice of urban grime as our quartet, who can only rely on themselves, navigate drug abuse, bad boyfriends and library books way past their due dates.
“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 with a sprinkle of Věra 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.” – Beatrice Loayza, Strange Pleasures
For Asian Heritage Month, the Dave Barber Cinematheque presents three newly restored films of the Hong Kong New Wave that explore the rapidly changing urban landscape and socioeconomic anxieties of Hong Kong – Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong (1997), Patrick Tam’s My Heart is That Eternal Rose (1989) and Lawrence Lau’s Spacked Out (2000). These films trace the expiration of the British lease on Hong Kong and the looming handover to China, spanning a time of significant social and political transformation, and revealing an atmosphere of alienation and uncertainty. This sense of impending change provided the backdrop against which the Hong Kong New Wave would emerge.
