Sam Fooi

This film has the look of a low-budget film by an inexperienced film-maker. However, it has an interesting story, two interesting main characters, and ultimately is worth watching.

The setting is a university in Hong Kong, and the two main characters are a young Chinese man (19 years old) and a considerably older (40s or 50s?) professor of English Literature. The dialogue is in both Chinese and English, with both languages subtitled in the other language.

Some of the flaws: the sound is sometimes lost below the background music, and is uneven in quality; the DVD I saw it on was not letterboxed, and the adaptation to the TV aspect ratio cut off the sides of many of the english subtitles, which was a bit frustrating.

The ending too, is a bit unrealistic and disappointing. But I'm still glad I watched it, and still will probably share it with friends.

The plot surrounding FLOP is rather simple. A middle age teacher attracts one of his felloes by the proposition of a gay book to read (Maurice, by J.M.Foster) while maintaining some distance of him, in views of their differences in expectations of live and age. And the film doesn't go very away from this plot, giving little, if one, intrinsically movements of why this relationship is faded to fail. Both actors perform not very well. The Teacher (Edmond Strode) is constantly trying to be though; the student (Alex Wong) fells, or pretends to feel, the pains of first love. And so they go through the film, giving a boring conflict of generations. As a hole, the film doesn't need more than the 50' attributed to it. It can lead to some reflection of the problems of love with such a difference of age, but that won't last a few minutes after the film is closed. Very boring.