The Props Are Fake: On Good Trip

A daughter is sitting at her father's bedside when the film crew calls. Could she go to the prop room and pick up a big soup bowl?

That little errand sets Good Trip in motion. Shan works in a film art department and spends her days shuttling between the set and the hospital. She means to stay with her father; he insists on coming with her. They slip out at night, collect the bowl, and then Dad hits the gas. Off to Macau to settle an old score with a friend, then to Okinawa to propose all over again to his wife, who runs a travel agency there.

A man with terminal cancer who can barely get out of bed can't just take off like that. The film sends him on his way anyway.

The Bowl in the Prop Room

The hinge of the Chinese title is the word for wanting. It can also mean imagining: Dad wants to travel, or he pictures himself already on the road. In an interview, co-director Norris Wong points to a Tang tale in which a soul slips away while the body stays put. The trip veers into period costume and old Hong Kong movie genres. At one point Nick Cheung suddenly speaks fluent Japanese.

And of all jobs, the daughter works in film art. She spends her days making things look like what they aren't. The bowl is fake, the walls are fake, the antiques are fake. The tears an actor sheds in front of them are real.

I like that the bowl comes before any talk of a trip. Shan is just picking up a prop. Her dad takes the chance to drag her along to do all the things that never quite happened in ordinary life. A made-up journey gives them time together.

After Sammo Hung Turns Up

Kueng is the kind of dad who makes his daughter cringe. Terrible food puns, whatever comes into his head said out loud, a few strands combed across his scalp like a barcode. He keeps talking about leaving the old car to his children as though it were the family fortune. Shan listens to his stories and believes about half of them.

Then, after her father dies, she meets Sammo Hung. One of those stories, it turns out, was true.

That moment hits me harder than the goodbye. Dad isn't around to say, 'See? Told you so.' But the father Shan carries in her head changes in a second. A story she'd heard often enough to tune out suddenly has something in it she'd never heard.

We know our parents' habits at home almost too well. You know when your dad is about to go quiet, and you can finish half his sentences. Ask what he was like when he was young, or who his friends were outside the house, and you might have very little to say. He may even have told you. You filed it under tall stories.

I'm glad the film lets Dad stay himself. The old car is still the old car, and the jokes haven't got any better. Shan learns one more thing about him; all the times he got on her nerves still count. There's no need to make a flawless statue of someone just because they're gone.

Okinawa, One More Time

There's a daughter who makes films offscreen, too. Norris Wong has talked about her father being the only person in the family who backed her choice to make movies. After his cancer returned, he still came to the set of My Prince Edward on a walking stick. By post-production he was bedridden and still told her to keep going. The last trip they took together was to Okinawa.

There's some of Norris Wong in Shan. Dad also borrows from co-director Wong Hoi's father, right down to the promise to leave the old car to his children. The two directors put this family together a detail at a time. In Okinawa the route on screen crosses one Norris Wong once travelled herself.

When someone's gone, you can't have another meal or another chat with them. But you go on living. Ten years later you face the same hard choice and finally see why they made it. Or someone mentions them in passing and you discover they were quite a different person around their friends. Some parts of a memory take a while to grow into.

Dad wanted to take a trip, and he couldn't go. So his daughter made a film out of the wanting.