Fagara [花椒之味] (2019)

Ha Rushu (Acacia) [Sammi Cheng] is an office worker in a Hong Kong travel agency. She is busy organizing trips for cheating businessmen and fending off unsolicited phone calls when she gets a call to say that her hotpot restauranteur father – Ha Leung [Kenny Bee] – is in hospital. At first she assumes this is another fake call but by the time she gets to the hospital, he has died (relatively young since he was born in 1953).

We (and Acacia) learn that Ha Leung had two other daughters by different mothers: Taiwanese Blanche [Megan Lai] and mainland Cherry [Li Xiaofeng]. Acacia seems to take this surprising news rather well and both come to Hong Kong for their father’s funeral which follows Daoist rites as Acacia was unaware he was a Buddhist. A (re) union of sorts occurs between the three half-sisters.

Gradually we learn more about the three women and their father. In one of many unlikely turns, the three team up to continue their father’s restaurant. But despite the efforts to open up the film, the main characters – with the partial exception of Acacia – remain cardboard cut-outs. And the father, rather than the selfish bastard he was, becomes the heart of an impromptu family while his various ‘wives’ are criticised for how they deal with the fall-out. Andy Lau turns up as Acacia’s ex-boyfriend to rather little effect.

Based on a novel by Amy Cheung and directed by Heiward Mak (and produced by Ann Hui), the film should be a strongly female-centred drama but despite the wealth of talent on display, it spends more time avoiding the obvious issues than addressing them. For probably understandable reasons, it makes little play of the potential HK-Taiwan-PRC dynamic between the sisters. But scenes where the sisters are all terrified by a cockroach or Acacia fails to learn to drive (or use a remote) make this an improbable feminist film.

Th film was surprisingly well reviewed and gets a reasonable 7.1 on Douban. But ultimately it is a standard sentimental drama and really a waste of talent.

The Chinese title is The Taste of Peppercorns referring to the hotpot restaurant and presumably the view that a mixture of flavours adds spice to life?