There’s something hidden within Wayne Wang’s 1989 feature, and it’s not what’s inside the suitcase handcuffed to the protagonist’s wrist at the start of the film. Life Is Cheap... but Toilet Paper Is Expensive (1989) has a sense of urgency like a ticking time bomb, perhaps arising from the mental countdown to the eventual handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to China in 1997.
Spencer Nakasako co-directs, co-writes, and stars as the unnamed Japanese Chinese American protagonist—“The Man with No Name”, to follow the references to cowboys and westerns woven into the narration. He travels from San Francisco to Hong Kong to deliver an important suitcase to “The Big Boss,” Mr. Lo (Lo Wei).
The camera takes a central role early on, configuring the first-person point of view of the protagonist as he’s confronted with different characters, from Victor Wong playing a blind man selling fake Rolexes to Chung Lam as one of the Big Boss’s employees, accused of being an ex–Red Guard who snitched on his own grandmother for her black-market connections.
The actors address the camera, the protagonist, and thus, the viewer as they commemorate their past or cry out recommendations for living in Hong Kong. A man introduced as Uncle Chang (Cheng Kwan Min) remembers his days as a dance instructor while he points out his four principles to live by: respect your elders, never trust anyone, keep “eyes, ears and nose” out of trouble, and finally, “must be humble.” Later, Mr. Lo explains he’s marrying off his daughter to a Chinese American anthropologist out of fear of the looming change in national sovereignty.
These moments have a confessional, observational nature. That tone is reinforced as the film shifts and turns into an observational documentary of the “wet market.” This footage, shot on a different stock, silently follows men slaughtering animals, preparing their shops, and using a dog harnessed to a treadmill to power a nearby machine.
The film generated some interest at the time of its release because it received an X rating, although it got into theaters unrated. It didn’t win many admirers of its almost experimental approach to a story that seems to dilute as it moves forward. Its title was remembered at the start of the pandemic, as it mimicked one of many micro-crises of that moment, but a new restoration presents an opportunity to consider the film anew. The most interesting elements lie underneath the crime elements that adorn it. Instead, what it as a documentary about Hong Kong and its people on the verge of the handover.The observational, travelogue tenor of its city scenes (six-minute foot-chase sequence included) has an almost nostalgic feel, as if it were the last chance that someone might have to see Hong Kong at that moment, before it’s changed forever.
Life Is Cheap... but Toilet Paper Is Expensive opens today, September 30, at BAM in a new digital restoration.
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