JONATHAN LI, CHOU MAN-YU: BEHIND THE SHADOWS (2024) - New York Asian Film Festival 2025

A jaded private dick in Kuala Lampur winds up investigating himself, then being a police suspect

From the Hong Kong school of filmmaking comes this jaded, ironic and also tecnically up to date tale of not very successful private detective Au-Yeung (Louis Koo) who makes his living off other peoples' secrets, adulteries, or lost pets. He used to be a high level detective consulted by important people, so he says, in Hong Kong, but here in KL where he came for his wife's work, he is a nobody just scraping by.

Au's usual routine changes as the film begins when the tables are turned and he realizes he has not been observing his own life. Wives in classic noir tales like Chinatown used to come to detectives suspecting their husbands. Now the men have cause to investigate the dames. Au’s main cases for the week are: a man looking for his missing fiancée; his gangster buddy Clowy (Raymond Wong) checking up on his boss’s wayward girl, Betty (Renci Yeung). Then comes the kicker: another guy appears to have his girl checked up on, and she turns out to be Au's own wife, Kuan Weng Sam (Chrissie Chau). She's been cheating on him, and the other guy hasn't even found out she's married. The writer is having fun on this one.

Then women are dying, and Au seems connected to them. He gets questioned by police detective Chen (Liu Kuan-ting ). The strange, sad-eyed Chen has a wife in a coma, and strange as it seems all these streams converge by the end of the story. We will find Chen has a story of adulutery in his wife too, and is a murderer, though he is suffering grievously over the coma and wants his wife to come back, but she does not.

After his police questioning, Chen knows who he is, so Au decides to lay low at his gangster buddy Clowy's place. As Clowy, Raymond Wong with his bleach-blond streaks and revealing casual wear is a colorful character. When they alk together one can appreciate the Cantonese drawl in which Au is more comfortable than the Mandarin the cop chief Chen used on him.

In shock, Au abandoned his missing-persons case. Hours later, she was murdered. Then the police find more bodies, all killed the same way. As the dead-eyed detective Chen every victim seems to connect back to Au-Yeung.

Central fall guy Au-Yeung is played by the ultra cool Louis Koo, who was seen in last year's NYAFF in Soi Cheung's widely reviewed Wu Xia replay, Aa href="https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5435"]>i]Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In[/i], where he plays a chain-smoking gang boss who poses as barbershop owner.

In this kind of noirish private dick tale a mood of existential dread is appropriate. One may wonder what this two-man directed tale written by a third man (Chou Man-Yu) is getting at with all these slutty dames, but Chrissie Chau is not that, she is subtle and beautiiful. Perhaps the film is commenting on the decline of relationships. The film weaves a tale of suspicion and danger punnctuated by complicated urban chase scenes. Au also has a little arsenal of tracking devices and other gadgetry to keep things up to date.

A festival blurb describes this Malasia-set film as stripping detective fiction "to its bones." It does feel stripped-down mainly through the early succession of similar-feeling short one-on-one scenes. But the plot is rather intricate; I didn't totally follow it. As usual with clasic noir as well as this distinctively updated variation, a moody atmosphere and a cool but downbeat protagonist are the main thing.

For more details, see Hong Kong writer Elizabeth Kerr's review in Kai Fong which identifies all the main characters. As Kerr says in her intro, this film is a "relationship drama-as-genre film," a double function that, again, is also not exactly stripped down.

Kerr points out this film, made by (Louis Koo;s production company One Cool, is part of his effort to strengthen Hong Kong cinema by internationalizing it, here with the Kuala Lampur setting and Malasian participatiion, and perhaps a structure designed, witout "reinventing the wheel, for wider audiences. Though this film falls short of greeatness, it contains hints and updated uses of GPS tracers and mobiles and urban murk that will appeal to the loyal film noir fan.

Behind the Shadows 私家偵探 (Cantonese si1 gaa zing taam, "Private Investigator"), 102 min., was released in China on May 31, 2025; in Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Macau on June 12; and in Taiwan on June 18. Screened for this revew as part of the July 11-17, 2025 New York Asian Film Festival. Showtime:
Tuesday July 15, 9:15pm
Film at Lincoln Center

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.