Just one look (or two) at Cheung Chau's now disused cinema

The old disused cinema that Riley Yip's Just One Look
made into the Hong Kong equivalent of Cinema Paradiso

How that which was the ticketing area
looks in May 2010

Some years back, before I moved to Hong Kong to live and work, two friends (including SBK) and I decided to spend one of our vacation days on Cheung Chau. For the most part, we were content to wander around fairly aimlessly and soak up the atmosphere to be found on this quiet -- especially on a week day -- island that's located just 10 kilometers away from Hong Kong Island but really can feel like a world apart from the busier and far more populous part of The Big Lychee.

At the same time however, the Hong Kong movie buff parts of SBK and myself also made it a point to visit locales that had become familiar to us via Riley Yip's charming coming of age movie that also works very well as a paean to Chinese cinema (Hong Kong but also Taiwanese). Thus it was that we were uncommonly thrilled when we did such as stroll along a Cheung Chau lane and suddenly come across the very place where Shawn Yue's character glimpsed Gillian Chung's walking along with an umbrella in her hand or feel that we had successfully located the place where Shawn Yue's character hailed a sampan to go in pursuit after another that Gillian Chung's had boarded and was taking her back to the local nunnery where she made her home.

As it so happens, some movie locations were easy enough to locate -- notably the Pak Tai Temple outside which Shawn Yue and Anthony Wong Chau San's characters had their fateful duel (which also happens to be the very local landmark on whose plaza the Cheung Chau Bun Festival's Bun Tower Scrambling Competition takes place).

However, it took quite a bit of effort for us to locate the cinema building whose cinema was already no longer in operation even at the time that Just One Look was filmed. (Indeed, back in 2002, there were reports of Cheung Chau residents being quite excited when the building was repainted and such as they thought that the island would have a cinema again -- only for their hopes to sadly get dashed.)

Even some eight years after the movie's release though, the structure remains easily recognizable to those of us who are fans of the film... which makes it all the more painful, really, to go up close and realize that the structure is not much more than a shell these days, with even parts of the building that had been revamped for the film now being in a major state of disrepair.

Still, we'll always have Just One Look -- and the warm feelings that movie engendered... even for those of us who hail from territories hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from Cheung Chau -- some of whom have never set foot on the island, yet have good vibes about it courtesy of what we saw of it on celluloid or home video and the magic of the movies in general and power in cinema as a whole.