Director – Li Ho – 2019 – Hong Kong – Cert. N/C 15+ – 30m
***1/2
A human finger fragment turns up inside a tomato in an out of town vegetable plot – FREE TO VIEW in the UK in the Fresh Wave short films strand of Focus Hong Kong 2021 Easter from Wednesday, March 31st to Tuesday, April 6th
Four characters in a vegetable garden out of town, three men and one woman. No names are exchanged. Some pretty basic living conditions. It’s not exactly clear what they do for a living, but snatches of conversations give hints. One talks about removing two kidneys from a man who, when they opened him up, turned out to have four. So he took out two as a favour, because the guy would probably have died had he left them in. There’s a pre-title sequence in which a man drives through a long underpass, parks at a garden in the dark then starts digging. Intimations of cloak and dagger lifestyles.
Events start to leave a strange taste in the mouth when one of them bits into a tomato and summons the others to show them it contains about an inch’s worth of dead human finger (the bit with the fingernail). There’s much argumentativeness and much making of excuses about why things have turned out the way they have. Sadly the characters aren’t that well delineated in the script and the ins and out of what these characters are up to is hard to follow. There’s also a nice touch wherein the finger fragment is preserved by its insertion into a frozen chicken which one of the characters has brought with him as part of some general supplies which have been deposited in the fridge.
What this does have however is bags of atmosphere… You can imagine a bunch of hardened criminals taking refuge at an out of the way place like this while things cool down in the aftermath of some deal going terribly wrong. The apparent tranquillity of planting, growing and harvesting vegetables such as tomatoes is clearly at odds with the things that these characters do when they’re not hiding out here and that lends the proceedings a certain poignancy. Moreover, when those activities spill over into such tasks violent confrontation or disposing of corpses, the atmosphere is electrifying even if the plot proves confusing.
The cast includes: Chan Kong Hung, Ben So, Wong Hiu Yee, Yeung Wei Lung, Yip Wing Wong, Guthrie, Lee King Kau, Phoebe Fung and Wu Yuen Yiu.
Taste Of Tomato is FREE TO VIEW online in the UK as part of Focus Hong Kong 2021 Easter from Wednesday, March 31st to Tuesday, April 6th.