Norris Wong’s first feature film, My Prince Edward, was one of the better Hong Kong indie movies of recent years. It starred singer/actress Stephy Tang as a young woman caught between East and West, Hong Kong and China, one man and another. Wong avoided all the expected turns of a scenario that could have made for either a romantic comedy or a bleak tragedy, instead opting for a mood of unstable melancholy, a frustrated despair that matched her lead character’s distress and, metaphorically, if you like, the state of Hongkongers in general in the late 2010s. The Lyricist Wannabe is her follow-up, coming five years after that promising debut — in between, she co-wrote the 2022 Wong Hoi anthology film Let It Ghost; Wong also produced the new movie. It likewise obstinately refuses to fit into any neat category, and also features Stephy Tang (albeit in a brief cameo), but otherwise seems to have little in common with the earlier film.
Chung Suet-ying stars as Law Wing-sze, an aspiring lyricist. We first meet her in high school, where she and her friends rewrite popular melodies with their own lyrics. She decides she wants to do this for a living, and spends the next several years trying to break into the industry. Along the way, she learns some of the theory behind writing Cantonese song lyrics, which is more difficult than Mandarin, Korean, or English because of the large number of tones in Cantonese. If the tone doesn’t fit the melody, either the meaning of the word changes or the music gets messed up. In between going to college and working PA and internship jobs, Sze sends out requests and gets some work writing lyrics for demos, but every time she seems to come close to breaking through, something happens to mess it all up.
Notably, Wong never asserts that Sze is particularly good at her craft. The lyrics we see seem to have potential, but are all kind of missing something, or have an awkward word or phrase that disrupts what should be the smoothness of a pop tune. This may simply be because of the English subtitle translation, but it seems intentional on Wong’s part, because her movie is not about “The Lyricist” — it’s about “The Lyricist Wannabe.” What’s important about Sze is not her writing, but the fact that she has this wildly improbable dream of artistic achievement that she works at for many, many years but never actually achieves. Sometimes her failures are because of her ability, but they’re also just as often matters of bad luck or timing.
When Wong visualizes Sze’s ambitions, she uses animation, childlike drawings of animals and rainbows and stars and such, the dreams of adolescence. As she gets older, these fade away into hard realities: complicated romantic relationships, conflicts with bosses, the need to find a real job. Sze doesn’t really have an idea she wants to express, a vision of the world she needs to put into words, or any real interest in writing or poetry outside of pop lyrics (notably, she studies biology in college, a field totally unrelated to her supposed life goal). Her lyrics are mechanically chosen to fit the melody of the songs she is given by other composers, but they rarely seem to have any personal meaning to her or her life. She’s not like the bus driver in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, quietly making terrific little bits of art out of the world around him. She would very much like to be that person, and she’s not completely without ability — she wins a lyric-writing contest, multiple composers tell her they like her work, etc. But by the movie’s end, she hasn’t gotten there yet and seems to have all but given up. Maybe, she says, she could have worked harder. Maybe she will.
Published as part of NYAFF 2024.
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