Set in Hong Kong in the course of the early days of the pandemic, Lam Sum’s tender drama photos a metropolis haunted by financial and political uncertainty. Storefronts are plastered with foreclosures and chapter notices, whereas discuss of shifting overseas hovers amid on a regular basis conversations. Stricken by defective tools, the one-man sanitary service operated by world-weary Chak (performed by Cantopop star Louis Cheung) is on the verge of breaking down. When requested by his ailing mom if God is telling him to surrender the enterprise, Chak self-deprecatingly describes himself as a speck of mud, so tiny that even the deities wouldn’t take discover.
Reluctantly employed as an additional pair of serving to arms on his cleansing rounds, single-mom Sweet (Angela Yuen) enters Chak’s life like a whirlwind of chaos. Along with her impossibly sunny perspective and vibrant vogue sense, Sweet may have come off as a manic pixie archetype; Yuen as a substitute manages to lend an emotional weight to the character’s capricious quirkiness. A very devastating sequence finds the pair scrubbing the human-shaped stain left by a anonymous soul who has died alone in squalor, one other speck of mud forgotten by the skin world.
Whereas the light dynamic between Sweet and Chak emphasises the significance of compassion, the movie is at occasions oddly moralistic in the direction of the determined selections triggered by monetary hardship. Sweet’s shoplifting behavior is handled as a reckless character trait to be reformed by Chak’s ideas and generosity, reasonably than a query of necessity. Ultimately, it’s considerably naive to recommend that there’s inherent advantage in enduring poverty with self-sacrificing the Aristocracy.
