3/5 stars
Home is where the musical instruments are for the main characters of Band Four, an amiable Hong Kong music drama that is far more comfortable coasting on the natural charisma of its fresh-faced performers than telling its contrived story of a dysfunctional family of talented musicians.
Mo Lai Yan-chi, the celebrated theatre actress and playwright who is making her film-directing debut, said recently that Band Four had been a work in progress for eight years because she was waiting for the right actors to match the parts.
She couldn’t have made a more sensible decision.
Cat lives with Riley (Rondi Chan Nok-ting), a nine-year-old drumming prodigy who initially appears to be her son – more on that later.
At the funeral of her dementia-stricken mother, Cat’s life takes a turn for the melodramatic when her father, King (Teddy Robin), suddenly shows up after abandoning the family more than 20 years earlier. He brings along Matilda (singer-songwriter Anna Hisbbur), Cat’s teenage half-sister she never knew existed.
Cat is rightfully offended by King’s insistence that the four live under the same roof. Lai arguably fails to reconcile the father-daughter conflict in a realistic way throughout the rest of the story, but one could make a good case that it’s really not the point of her film.
In spite of its loose narrative, Band Four is quite a pleasant watch with its humorous snippets of the everyday lives of its four likeable protagonists.
The growing bond between the academically challenged Riley and the introverted Matilda is a joy to behold.
It’s not a spoiler to say that the four will set aside their differences and play in a band (see film title), even if Lai also finds it necessary to include a few dramatic twists – cue the mystery surrounding Riley’s identity and Cat’s struggle with memory loss, which at first appears as merely a personality quirk, only to prove far more serious later on.
Band Four culminates in an unlikely musical finale atop Hong Kong’s Lion Rock that is akin to a call to arms against collective amnesia for Hong Kong people.
Lai’s story may be fanciful in multiple ways, but the emotions she evokes with this music-driven film do mostly feel genuine.
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Khushi Patel is a science fiction author who lives in Austin, Texas. She has published three novels, and her work has been praised for its originality and imagination. Khushi is a graduate of Rice University, and she has worked as a software engineer. She is a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and her books have been nominated for several awards.
