Love on Delivery

Ho Kam-An delivers dim sum for a restaurant. He falls for a girl who studies judo and is ready to do anything for her. But she is taken with the best fighter in the hall and Ho is humiliated in front of a crowd. He is beaten, mocked, and she leaves with someone else in front of him. Then a man turns up: he declares himself a great master and will teach Ho to fight for money. The man is a fraud, the techniques he teaches are invented, and Ho takes them seriously. He enters a tournament anyway. Lee Lik-Chi directs. Stephen Chow plays Ho; Ng Man-Tat and Christy Chung are in the cast. It is a Hong Kong production. Its humour rests on the style called mo lei tau, built on nonsense, wordplay and sudden shifts of register, and bound tightly to Cantonese. Chow's character goes into a fight wearing a cartoon mask, and that scene is the film's most cited section. The narrative imitates the shape of the fight film and makes every step of that shape ridiculous. The pairing of Ng Man-Tat and Chow worked together across many films of this period, and the fit here comes out of that. The matter it works at is humiliation; the comedy comes from there and the character really is incompetent. Its limit is translation; most of the jokes are bound to the language and are lost in subtitles. Who it is for: viewers who like Hong Kong comedy and Stephen Chow. Who it is not for: the humour is very local, the structure scattered, and the woman thinly written.