Neon lights have not been associated with romantic drama, love and longing too strongly, more often than not they serve as an aesthetic feature of the set of action-thrillers which have explosive endings and strong plots. In her drama “A Light Never Goes Out“, Anastasia Tsang does the complete opposite and makes the most of the stunning background lights in Hong Kong to make it look unreal by showing how one woman finds solace while being surrounded by all the lights and colors in the world in Hong Kong and how this helps her survive.
As a result, Heung isn’t first lured into her husband’s line of work which wasn’t actually profitable for their household considering the law passed by the Hong Kong government in 2010, which banned everything resembling a neon sign. She gets to have a change of mind when she unexpectedly meets Bill’s apprentice Leo (Henick Chou) in a workshop that her husband used to hide from her. After being convinced to keep the business about the lights alive, she agrees to pick up where her husband left off and make a large intricate neon sign that used to unite them. It is not really her place, and she has to figure out how to make bends and colors in the tubes of neon lights for the first time with the help of Leo.
Nosyalgia is fully entertained with scenes depicting the actual processes involved in creating glowneon signs: the drawing, bending and burning paint on the neon tube all take a considerable amount of time. The constant neon streak in A Light Never Goes Out is an effective device when the story requires tender emotions to dispel the harsh ones. In particular, there is only one scene that would serve well to explain Heung’s mania to recreate the past: otherwise in most of the other flashbacks of their married life one cannot see much tenderness between the two. They first meet on a rooftop as children where Heung is looking at a big neon sign and Bill is somewhere working on it instead. Soon enough, he will fulfill her great wish of dancing on a lit podium.
The husband-wife angle seems to have some gaps in its equations but Tsang manages to have a take on the other set of conflicting characters, mother and daughter. Tsang had earlier said that the daughter character in Prism (Cecilia Choi) displays exaggeratedly cold reactions to her mother’s sudden obsession with the neon artisanry and even to her sorrow, which was perhaps too much to comprehend. Then the film progresses, it gradually becomes clear that they never had proper bonding which was blocked by far too many secrets. Here, soft light is put at the beginning, to mitigate tension and initiate the start of communication. The transition is done smoothly.
The romance of Hong Kong’s ‘calligraphy inscribed with light’ is something Tsang’s work “A Light Never Goes Out” disappointed with the same way Heung missed her husband. This, I assume, might be where the artisan in Tsang’s movie lost it, as in 1973 he didn’t craft the world’s biggest neon sign, while being world record setting, there was an even more historically relevant detail that was absolutely sweet.
Sylvia Chang’s portray of Mei Heung in ‘A Light Never Goes Out’ earned her the Best Leading Actress Award at 59th Golden Horse Film Awards where the film too had a nomination in the Special Effects category. After the screenings at Rotterdam, it had its official European first release.
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