The Teacher Without Chalk (2000)Government directives see Liverpool School having to cut a class from the coming year's Form Five. And what better class to wipe out this year than F4E - the horde of underachievers lurking down the corridor. The kids are tearing through fill-in teachers in minutes, not days, and have no will to learn. The principal (Tsui Kam-kong) knows he'll boot them out come the end of the year and is ambivalent - he'll be happy if they all fail the year-end exams, with just temporary staff holding them over until then. 16 substitute teachers quit handling the class and now teacher May Lo (Mung) has to find number 17. Getting desperate she leafs through her old school year book, calling all former classmates until she reaches the final name: Cheung Ying (Cheung). Ying's grades plummeted in secondary when he moved toward his current occupation of debt collector. But May remembers his primary school ambition to be a teacher. She tracks him down, buys him out of a sticky mess, and brings him in to teach. He's quickly okayed by the principal and, after an initial misfire, Ying sets about getting the kids interested in learning. The otherwise routine classroom drama is enlivened by Ying's underworld experience - a Mongkok excursion to check out junkies, prostitutes and loansharks gets the kids all fired up on biology, history and maths. Moments of near-fantasy appear with mysterious nun Sister Teresa (Mok) wandering around the school, and notes flying in with tip-offs on F4E kids' out-of-school activities. An unexpected touch is that the F4E schoolkids don't have any triad links, let alone involvement in illegal activity. When they're shown in Mongkok, it's almost like they're visiting a whole new world. Instead, some are shown as problem students based on others' poor opinions and misconceptions that have sent and kept them languishing in the bottom class. Albert Mak's film doesn't provide much excitement in its lightweight comedy or drama, but it benefits from having some distinctive characters. Ken Lo plays the schoolyard disciplinarian, aptly named Discipline. Tsui Kam-kong overacts as a principal getting hooked on confiscated cough syrup. And there's something quite absurd about Mr Ono - a Japanese national who can only speak Mandarin and wafts about school filling in on classes, helping students, getting cosy with May, and generally looking quite wholesome and happy. Nick Cheung does the laid-back petty gang member moves comfortably and Yoyo Mung dresses down with bland outfits, dowdy glasses and limp hair as a teacher with little care for her appearance since joining the teachers' ranks. Production standards aren't all that high but seem stretched for a slightly above-par low budget film experience. Gross-out humour is suddenly thrown in a couple of times, adding little to the film for me but pleasing the audience of teens seated nearby. The synch sound raises the quality, only let down by one student perpetually being dubbed with background noise lowered. The entire cast seems enthusiastic in playing their roles, and that's something I appreciate seeing in any local production. |
Credits: Directed by Albert Mak |
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