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An independent film being made on a wing and a prayer is not unusual. But Made in Hong Kong (1997), writer-director Fruit Chan’s second movie, takes the idea to a different level. It was made with just $80,000; exclusively made use of the short ends of film stock Chan had accrued over time; and predominantly starred inexperienced actors. Against its skimpy odds, it wound up taking the then-38-year-old Chan’s career — so far mostly involving him assistant directing — to a new level. It became such a critical favorite, getting a total of 19 Hong Kong Film Award nominations (with 13 wins), that it was selected as Hong Kong’s submission for the Academy Awards’ Best Foreign Language Film prize. (It ultimately wasn’t chosen.)

It’s not hard to love this trajectory for a tiny movie — the little film that could besting projects with more resources and brand recognition behind them. But it’s hard to love Made in Hong Kong itself. Decentness at evoking youthful alienation and the everyday effects of the Hong Kong handover aside, none of the characters emerges as much more than an idea, with the shifts in and out of punky Chungking Express (1994)-esque insolence and dramatic gravity too disjointed to maintain the forceful sense of pensiveness it’s ultimately going for. Stylish and roaming, Made in Hong Kong keeps you at a remove.

Sam Lee, whom Chan literally cast off the street, plays Autumn Moon, a high-school dropout who’s been debt-collecting with his nosebleed-prone friend, Sylvester (Wenders Li), for a Triad member to support himself and his mother, recently left behind by his unfaithful father. A self-described lone wolf, Moon feels aimless until he meets Ping (Neiky Yim Hui-Chi), the 16-year-old daughter of a debtor who eventually reveals that she suffers from a potentially fatal kidney disease. In love with her basically from the moment she proposes lowering her mother’s debt in exchange for sex, Moon’s focus starts resting all on a girl always threatening to slip away. It drives him so much that when an opportunity comes for a hit job, he takes it: the payoff could offer a permanent easing of Ping’s medical bills.

Other subplots intermingle with that main romantic arc. Moon and Sylvester are haunted by Susan (Amy Tam Ka-Chuen), a teen who jumps off a building to her death and whose bloodied suicide note falls into Sylvester’s hands. (He and Moon are determined to get it into the hands of those meant to read it.) Moon also contemplates, meat cleaver in hand, getting revenge on the father who’d practically disposed of him and his mother. 

Chan beautifully aestheticizes Moon’s subjectivity with inspired bursts of slow motion and fast cutting, a throbbing soundtrack, and sometimes nauseously physical cinematography whose blueish tint echoes Moon’s melancholy. But even with additional narration from the character to impart some clarity on his interior life, Lee’s performance always feels impersonal. It doesn’t help that the other principal characters — particularly Ping, whose thin Manic Pixie Dream Girl quality erodes her into so much of a projection for Moon that their love story never fully clicks — have a similar insubstantiality. It’s easy to appreciate the movie’s broad look at a pessimistic and disproving side of the often-repeated idea that one’s youth is a time of wide-open possibility and the freedom to fuck up. But Made in Hong Kong’s absence of convincing emotional specificity makes it more admirable than truly affecting.