There are films that paint the bumpy road we take through youth as a time of discovery and magic, despite - or perhaps, oddly, because of - all the hormones and existential angst that come with it. Notwithstanding its chirpy, colour-splashed publicity campaign, May We Chat is not one of those films. Instead, filtered through the ultra-hip prism of popular Chinese social networking app WeChat, it explores the grim, bitter realities faced by kids struggling to survive in a seedy, hopeless modern-day Hong Kong. But, although writer-director Philip Yung's sophomore effort clearly wants to say a lot about society, it winds up descending into bleak torture porn and is, as a result, curiously devoid of emotional power and meaning.
The film follows three girls who have befriended one another on WeChat, but have never met in person. There's Yan (Kabby Hui), the spoilt rich girl who wanders aimlessly through life and one casual sexual encounter after another. We also meet Wai (Heidi Lee), a spirited girl trying to take care of her drug-addled mother and younger sister; and Chiu (Rainky Wai), a deaf-mute girl who lives with her grandmother and earns cash on the side as a hooker. When Yan mysteriously vanishes after a suicide attempt, Wai and Chiu finally meet in person to try and track her down.
It's impossible to deny Yung's ambition: he weaves an almost epic collision of character and circumstance into his script. We find out more about each member of the trio: Yan's tale is coloured in via sombre flashbacks to her unhappy past as a child of divorce and remarriage, while Wai and Chiu struggle to make ends meet even as their quest to find their friend plunges them ever deeper into the crime and grime of Hong Kong's underworld. This allows Yung to conjure up moments both shocking and chilling, largely involving Chiu as she makes the ultimate - and most horrific - sacrifice to get a lead as to Yan's whereabouts.
Yung even hints at the cyclical nature of lost youth and tragic violence by closely tying his film to Lovely Fifteen, a 1983 movie that examined in bleak detail the easy degeneracy of those who are barely older than children, but eager to believe themselves adults. In fact, Yung brings in two actors from that older film - Irene Wan and Peter Mak - to play older versions of themselves in May We Chat. Wan, as Yan's mother, and Mak, as a gangster turned kindly pimp, provide a tremulous link to an era gone by, even as each tries to deal with the new ways in which youths interact in this present.
But, smart and hip as it all is, May We Chat is also an oddly unemotional, almost clinical beast of a film. The story lines intersect in confusing and frustrating ways, cutting back and forth across time, with the overall plot never really seeming to make much sense - even though, once you've pieced it together, it's actually frightfully simple. It's tough, too, to form much of an emotional connection to any of Yung's lead characters. In effect, we are told how we should feel about each character, but never really feel it for ourselves. This has little to do with his cast: they're all surprisingly competent for newcomers, particularly Wai, who does a lot with very little - we never see where all the money she gets from prostituting herself goes, since her grandmother never seems to benefit from it.
It doesn't help that the final act of the film descends into a cold pit of torture porn. Yung ratchets up the violence to alarming degrees, without ever grounding it in something more real or emotional. There's an odd emptiness to the way in which his camera lingers almost horrifyingly on Chiu's bruised face, or Yan's mascara-scarred cheek, in the aftermath of some explosive act of violence. Wai's final emotional outburst, after weeks of tense searching for Yan, feels less truthful than callous.
That is, perhaps, Yung's point. The world is bleak, society is grim, and the few friends we make never really understood us at all. Wash, rinse, repeat. It certainly captures the zeitgeist of a world now moderated, shaped and broken apart by social networking, but May We Chat ultimately fails to connect: both as a coherent piece in and of itself, and with audiences. It may be smart, and it may be ambitious - but it's also hollow, and not entirely convincing as either thriller or social commentary.
