1997 | Colour | 86′ | 35mm Director/Screenwriter: Joe Ma Cinematographer: Cheung Man-po Cast: Stephen Chow, Eric Kot, Chingmy Yau, Karen Mok In Cantonese with Chinese and English subtitles Post-screening talk in Cantonese Speaker: Shum Long-tin (Writer and critic) Nothing is better to provoke contemplation on the justice system than the mo lei tau (wu li tou in Putonghua) comedies of Stephen Chow. While his Justice My Foot (1992) is cherished by fans, Lawyer Lawyer is often neglected, sometimes even dismissed. Perhaps the situation can be described as “Justice? My foot!” Set in the late Qing Dynasty, featuring the famous Guangdong “zong si” (zhuang shi in Putonghua, roughly equivalent to a lawyer today) Chan Mong-gut (Chen Mengji in Putonghua), the story moves from China to Hong Kong, resulting in a clash between the Chinese legal system and the British one. By turns legendary and notorious, Chan was mo lei tau long before mo lei tau was cool, portrayed in folksy retellings as someone who excels in humorously absurd tactics in court, making mockery of the legal system and the authoritative figures operating in it. One reason the absurdist, nonsensical practice of mo lei tau is so popular and endearing is that it is a passive-aggressive tool to stand up to the injustice brought by the powerful. Chan’s exploits in Cantonese folk tales and Stephen Chow’s antics in Hong Kong comedies are at once outrageous and subversive, using clever wordplays spiced with irrelevance and mischievous pranks marked by inconsequence to challenge social conventions and established norms. And in Lawyer Lawyer, Chan and Chow merge as one to effectively highlight the ethical complexities of the legal process with nonsense!

12/10/2025(Sun) 15:00

$75