“I’m developing an algorithm to define the connection between Jewish guys and Asian girls,” quips a classmate to a young Mark Zuckerberg in David Fincher’s The Social Network, riffing on a stereotype the Facebook founder would eventually affirm in his own life. Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong tracks an instance of this connection across two fateful nights, separated by a year, and doesn’t get any closer to shedding any light on the phenomenon. It doesn’t, indeed, demystify its central romance much at all. Writer-director Emily Ting has made a nice movie about nice people whose mutual attraction is taken as a given. They walk, talk and navigate minor crises of conscience against the backdrop of Hong Kong’s insomniac splendor, rarely exceeding a compulsory level of charm or dramatic interest.
If the premise sounds familiar, that’s because Richard Linklater already filmed this story, for his 1995 indie classic Before Sunrise. In that film, the principals were an American backpacker and a French student who meet on a train from Budapest to Paris and decide on a whim to spend the night wandering Vienna together. It is not a film anyone would want to compete with. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy’s pairing is a masterclass in chemistry, and the micro-premise keeps the script from getting in the way of their freewheeling, lived-in ruminations, furtive glances and stolen kisses. What might have seemed hardly enough scenario for one movie at the time ended up begetting two more, revisiting the same characters at nine year intervals. By most accounts, the films only get better.
Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong likewise keeps things simple. In Ting’s film, both leads are Americans: Josh (Bryan Greenberg) is a financier living in Hong Kong; and Ruby (Jamie Chung) is a toy designer, in town on business. He guides her to the bar where she’s meeting friends, and by the time they arrive, she decides she’d rather have a drink with him. When Josh reveals he’s already spoken for, they part ways inamicably. Cut forward a year to a ferry they both just happen to be riding. He’s quit his job to write full-time; she’s taken a permanent post in Hong Kong. Josh is still with his girlfriend from before. It was her birthday party, as he reluctantly reveals, that he ducked out of when he met Ruby, who’s now engaged. He requests a redo of their first night, in better faith and full transparency. She acquiesces, and so they roam, eat and haggle for trinkets, unable in the end to uphold the night’s just-friends pretenses.
The devil is in the details for a movie like this, and a handful of nice touches distinguish Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong. Location shooting and gestures towards local tradition, like table sharing at restaurants, generate a quiet roar of authenticity. Tourist clichés are remodeled for realism. The wonderful Richard Ng plays a shrewdly multilingual fortune teller that, in another movie, would likely have been a broadly-rendered shyster.
Most striking is how Ting – who seems to have based the film loosely on her own experience, recounted in her 2008 documentary Family, Inc., of moving to Hong Kong to take over her father’s toy company – represents East-West crossover as a fact of modern life. Ruby’s family is from the mainland, but it’s Josh, a New York Jew, whose fluent Cantonese comes to the rescue during one dicey negotiation. A glib payoff, to be sure, and yet when Josh assures Ruby afterward that his Yiddish is equal to her Chinese – that is, nonexistent – the moment rings true. For the current generation of globally employed, profoundly diverse American adults, language is becoming more and more divorced from ethnic heritage.
On the stereotypic nature of Josh and Ruby’s pairing, however, the film is frustratingly coy. Ruby discovers from a stealthy perusal of Facebook that Josh’s girlfriend is also Chinese-American, followed by Josh volunteering the fact that he’s dated a number of Asian women, forcing him to withstand accusations of “yellow fever.” Then the issue is laid to rest. It would be one thing if Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong were trading in the casual multiculturalism of, say, the Fast and Furious films. But the camera lingers during Ruby’s discovery, begging questions. Does this change anything, we wonder, considering she’s already hesitant to trust him? How does she feel about being fetishized? Does she care? What of her own apparent attraction exclusively to white guys?
The high instance of Jewish men dating Asian women isn’t rocket science: In the American context, both groups are culturally oriented towards academic success and so end up in the same spaces in their early adulthood. Yet once Ting’s script gets these questions in its sights, it steers back on course towards its glib themes and readymade conflicts. Josh and Ruby’s conversations center on what they’d really like to be doing with their lives, a choice presented as between creative pursuits and well-compensated gigs that, I suspect, many of their peers would no doubt be happy to take off their hands. When pressed to describe what they like about each other, he points to her “sass,” and she, his “quotes.” When they turn up at his friends’ rock show, you better believe they start dancing tantalizingly close – and that his fiancée’s bestie turns up to catch them in the act.
But the main problem is that Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong just isn’t very compelling. In his contrarian critique of the Before Sunrise trilogy, New Yorker critic Richard Brody accused Linklater’s films – erroneously – of failing to capture the subtle tics, furtive glances and improvisational detours promised by his long takes. The criticism applies far more aptly to Ting’s film, which similarly holds steady on Josh and Ruby as they walk, talk and so on. For their part, Greenberg and Chung, a couple in real life, bring to their roles the gentle flirtatious hum of attractive young people who wouldn’t mind making out if they had to. (Spoiler alert: they don’t.) But their talk is as bland as it is earnest. When Ruby suggests, over their first drink, that Josh follow his dreams rather than stay in comfort and security, Josh receives the advice as a revelation, as if he had never thought of that before. In stark contrast to the literate, vibrantly curious leads of Before Sunrise, Josh and Ruby express cultural interest only when they discover a shared appreciation for Seinfeld, which they observe is a show “about nothing.” Watching Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong is much like eavesdropping on an OkCupid date between unimaginative but successful people. And like the middlebrow gastropubs where such activity flourishes, the film is lit like a Christmas tree and soundtracked like an insurance ad aimed at millennials.
In carrying on the noble cinematic tradition of walky, talky romance, Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong hits some of the right notes, but not enough. It knows the words but not the music.