The film wants to bring you back to the 1970s by it presenting a lot of streams of consciousness in terms of cinematography through the painstaking effort of director Philip Yung, eventually hitting the big screen, prompting the wind to blow. ‘When the Wind Blows’ is a Cantonese movie infused with Hong Kong and mainland China film stars.

‘When the Wind Blows’, redolent of pretty much reminiscence, is going to show us how Hong Kong in the 1970s was with its many scenes that can effortlessly evoke our feelings and emotions. I especially enjoy watching the old Hong Kong buildings that have been with or without reason dismantled today, leaving collective memories. Those nostalgic scenes have unwittingly triggered many different kinds of feelings about old Hong Kong which was under the era of the rule of the British colony. However; when old Hong Kong could look so simple with its unsophisticated buildings and streets unlike now it is rife with sophisticated infrastructure boasting technology, its people then were not as simple as the place was, and, the film, without further ado, tells you what the history of old Hong Kong was all about.

Lei Le (played by Aaron Kwok) and Nan Jiang (played by Tony Leung) were two famous and outstanding cops in the 1970s. Before the Hong Kong ICAC (Independent Commission Against Corruption) was established, these two cops were to take bribes in their jobs, and as the norm dominating, they ought to do so or they would be offended or even attacked. When people in the arena are involuntary, these two cops established a bribe system for the force and gained ground until the imbalances of the black and white blatantly surged. Philip Yung has relentlessly depicted this specific situation telling us what a place is when bribery is rampant and unscrupulous, especially when those activities are in the hands of the powerful and the wicked.

The streams of consciousness conspicuously spinning in the movie making ‘When the Wind Blows’ not only bring us back to the 1970s but also to World War II when the time Hong Kong was savagely invaded by Japan. The movie ruthlessly tells us Lei Le had a bitter experience about love in this war rendering him unable to live a happy married life afterward. Philip employs a way of psychedelic to depict Lei Le’s pain that is embedded deep in his heart, telling us he is a man of great affection and emotion despite he has betrayal of his wife Cai Zhen (played by Du Juan) by arbitrarily keeping a woman outside, and indulging himself in sexually obsessing with her. My sentiment after watching this episode is I find Lei Le is eventually a man of quality, for I can see he finds himself illegitimate to vent his improper sexual feelings to his wife, with his painful memory of a girl who saved him and loved him in WWII, but to a woman who works in a bar as a dancer whom he finds he is comfortable to have that improper sex with her when he doesn’t have any burden or responsibility but just transactions with her. I hope Philip and the females will find this sentiment legitimate.

In ‘When the Wind Blows’, Philip has made the main characters quite restrained with them behaving in the critical moment, say, when Lei Le knows Cai Zhen has paid a Chinese practitioner to kill his outside woman with a baby inside her, he does not hit her but hits the gigantic goldfish bowl in the sitting room to vent his ferocious anger and emotion, and, Cai Zhen also knows to feel regretful, explaining to her betraying husband that she just wants to kill the baby rather than the woman, citing with a moan she is cheated by the practitioner. Philip does not adopt an approach of grandstanding in this movie of crimes and betrayal despite he is eligible to do so in this genre of film, instead; he opts for having the characters restrained making the movie more comfortable to watch in addition to making it tell us humanity does exist even when we are hostile. This goodness in the film is what I appreciate much and I find it the most precious of all.

‘When the Wind Blows’ is absolutely a film worth watching especially if you are a Hongkonger who has lived a life in the 1970s and experienced not a little hardship or chaos then and wants to have a review or aftertaste now.