Film Review: City of Glass 玻璃之城 (1998) - Hong Kong
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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There is a moment in Mabel Cheung's "City of Glass" that stopped me cold. Shu Qi, playing Vivien across two decades of Hong Kong's most turbulent history, stands before a rain-streaked window. She doesn't speak. She doesn't weep. She simply touches the glass, and in that single gesture, Cheung captures everything the movie is trying to say about memory, exile, and the terrible beauty of things you cannot hold onto.
This is not a film that announces its greatness. It insinuates. It arrives like a half-remembered song, and before you know it, you're weeping not for the characters but for the versions of yourself that might have lived their lives.
The structure is audacious: a car crash in 1997 London kills Raphael (Leon Lai) and Vivien before we know who they are. Cheung then spends two hours showing us exactly who they were, and why their deaths matter. This is risky. It should feel manipulative. But the director has the courage to let time do its work, moving back and forth between the fiery student protests of 1970s Hong Kong and the quiet desperation of lovers watching their city prepare to change hands forever.
Leon Lai plays Raphael as a man who carries his idealism like a wound. In the early scenes, he burns. Later, he smolders. It's a performance of remarkable interiority. But the movie belongs to Shu Qi. Watch how she ages not through makeup but through the gradual lowering of her defenses. Young Vivien charges into rooms. Older Vivien enters them sideways, as if expecting the furniture to strike back. This is acting of the highest order, the kind that makes you forget anyone is performing at all.
Young Daniel Wu and Nicola Cheung play the duo respective grown children but unrelated, and they do fine work. But their subplot about the lingering mysteries of their parents' past feels like the movie taking a breath it doesn't quite need. These scenes are well-acted but over-explained. Cheung trusts her audience with the timeline jumps. She should trust us with a little ambiguity here too.
What haunts me, though, is the city itself. Cheung photographs old Hong Kong like someone cataloging a dream before it fades. The glass of the title is everywhere: windows, mirrors, storefronts, the fragile membrane between past and present. "Try to Remember" plays, and you realize the song isn't nostalgic—it's a warning. We don't remember. We think we do, but memory is just another kind of glass, and it breaks so easily.
"City of Glass" is too patient for some viewers. It asks you to sit with regret, to feel the weight of roads not taken. But for those willing to meet it on its own terms, it offers something rare: the sense that a movie has not just told you a story but shared a confidence. They're not failures. They're the space between what the film says and what it can only suggest—which, come to think of it, is exactly the point. (Neo, 2026)