King of Chess

A Hong Kong film that tells two periods together through chess. The film runs two stories inside each other. The first is set during the Cultural Revolution: Wang Yisheng is one of the students sent to the countryside. He is poor, hungry, and his only occupation is chess. He learned the game in the street rather than at school and loses to nobody. The second is set in Taiwan in the 1970s. An advertising man from Hong Kong is brought in to rescue the ratings of a failing television programme. He finds an extraordinarily gifted child and puts him into a tournament, in front of the cameras. What the two stories share is this: how a gift is used by the order it finds itself in. Politics in one, ratings in the other. Tony Leung Ka-fai plays Wang Yisheng; John Shum is in the cast. The production's own story is tangled. It began as a joint work by Yim Ho and Tsui Hark, the two fell out during shooting, and Tsui Hark carried the later stages. Yim Ho disowned the film afterwards. The source is Ah Cheng's novella of the same name. An interesting example for anyone who likes Asian cinema and two-period storytelling. For a viewer who wants coherence, the two lines do not quite fit together, and the production history explains why.