Film Review: Kiss Me Goodbye 戀愛季節 (1986) - Hong Kong
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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There is a particular kind of Hong Kong film from the mid-1980s that feels like it was shot between breaths—light on its feet, slightly melancholy, and completely uninterested in the usual melodrama of young love. Kiss Me Goodbye is one of those films. Calvin Poon Yuen-leung’s directorial debut is a modest, clear-eyed romance about two people who meet while chasing the same dream and slowly discover that the dream may cost them each other.
Anthony Wong Yiu-ming, still years away from the intensity that would define his later career, plays Sing with an almost shy naturalism. He is a stagehand with vague ambitions and a soft, slightly drifting energy. Loletta Lee’s Icy is the more driven of the two—practical, focused, already tasting the first real opportunities of a music career. Their chemistry is quiet and convincing. They do not fall in love in the grand cinematic sense; they simply begin spending time together, talking about America, rehearsing songs, walking the streets of a city that still feels young and open. The film trusts these small moments more than big declarations.
What makes the picture work is its refusal to punish its characters for wanting more than love. Ambition here is not treated as a moral failing. It is simply a fact of life for people in their early twenties who can already see the shape of the future they want. The tension between career and relationship is handled with unusual restraint for a Hong Kong romance of the period. There is no villain, no sudden betrayal, no third-act explosion of tears. Just two young people discovering that timing and talent do not always move in the same direction.
The film’s texture is one of its quiet strengths. The music world of mid-80s Hong Kong feels lived-in rather than staged. Concert backstages, record shops, late-night streets, the casual presence of people who would go on to become major figures—all of it carries the soft authenticity of a time and place that still believed the next opportunity might be around the corner. William Chang’s contribution to the visual design helps give even ordinary locations a certain clean, slightly dreamy clarity.
Kiss Me Goodbye is not a great film in the sweeping sense. It is smaller than that, and happier to be so. But it is honest about the way youthful desire and youthful ambition can coexist and then gently pull apart. In its best moments it feels less like a conventional love story and more like a snapshot of a generation just beginning to understand the price of the lives they are choosing.
Movies are a machine that generates empathy. This one generates a quiet, specific kind of understanding—for people who want everything at once, and for the moment when they realize they cannot have it. That is more than enough. (Neo, 2026)