Love in a puff is a film that takes place in 2009 in Hong Kong when January 1, 2007, Hong Kong has implemented a total ban on smoking indoors, forcing smokers to move from their offices to the back alleys to smoke. Since then, smokers from different backgrounds and professions have opened up a special place to gossip and chat and make friends in the back alleys. This begins an unpredictable and ambiguous relationship between Cherie and Jimmy. They fall in love with each other although Cherie has a boyfriend. They often met in the street to smoke and send text messages frequently. However, an ambiguous text message makes Cherie break up with her boyfriend. When Cherie decides to live with Jimmy, Jimmy’s attitude makes Cherie confused, and Cherie tries desperately to test him. Then, as the government further increases the cigarette tax and increase the price of cigarette, Jimmy and Cherie as a smoker tries to purchase cigarette as much as possible, and meet at the shop, they go together to purchase more cigarette and Jimmy finally expresses his love for Cherie.
We first compare how the space is presented in the film and how it is seen and experienced in reality. The space we choose is alley. Cherie and Jimmy met in an alley, which is a narrow place that gathers smokers after Hong Kong outlawed all indoor smoking areas. In the movie, the most of shoots in the film take place in that alley, showing the fast-food love in Hong Kong and the love between Jimmy and Cherie. It only takes seven days for them to get together and for about four days they spend time together in the alley to smoke, so that alley can be regarded as the witness of their love. Many close-ups are used in filming the alley, especially when Jimmy and Cherie light each other’s cigarettes. This shows that their love relates to cigarettes and because of cigarettes.
One of the shooting locations is the alley next to Pacific Place.The space has a sense of depth, with gray old walls. This alley has been appearing from time to time from the beginning to the end of the movie and is an important development site for their love story. In the reality, It is very narrow, with a small space, giving us a sense of suppression, and at the time we went there, there are many cigarette butts on the ground, which indicates that although we did not see many people gathering together, many people still choose to smoke there. The alley is spacious, with some people alone with phones to communicate with other people, it can be regarded as a private place.
Another fragment describes the first time Cherie and Jimmy take a walk and chat together privately on a passenger footbridge. In the film, the passenger footbridge seems to be very spacious. There are only a few people there, creating a private and trustful place for them. The color of the bridge is mainly a mixture of pink and blue, and the bridge column is white. The place is located in Kwun Tong, which is called Jimmy bridge. In reality, the bridge is quite grey in color and seems to have a sense of age. In the film, the director took some shoot from the bridge’s perspective to show the conversation between Jimmy and Cherie. This applies to the bridge as the narrative to express their relationship in a more indirect way.
There are some techniques are applied in the film.
Firstly, the film applies Chiaroscuro, which means the application of light and dark to different planes in the images to add the illusion of dimensional depth. It is used in the scenes of the alley. The brightness farther away at the end of the alley is quite low, while it is brighter around the characters near the camera. The sharp contrast between light and dark can make the shot clearer, enriching the layers of the shot, and emphasizing the shot of the main character, while it avoids being tedious.Secondly, Montage are also applied, which is the technique that combining shots that are depictive. Clips by different shooting angles are combined together, giving close-ups of everyone chatting in the alley, creating a noising and lively atmosphere.
All in all, through watching this film, we can better understand the relationship between film and architecture and the application of different filming techniques in expressing the plot and character relationship.
Rui Haoning 3035950711
Zhu Jingyi 3035952381
Your podcast has some analysis on the different spaces in the film and how they differ on screen and in reality. There is some analysis on the spatial quality and how the camera depicts the space but can be further expanded to build a stronger analysis. Some questions to consider: Where are smoking spaces in the city? What are the characteristics of these spaces and how do they differ from non-smoking areas? How do people behave differently in these spaces? Why are there multiple cuts and shots of different length/distances in these scenes? Some structuring changes would benefit your podcast as there are segments of silence when you play the video- you can perhaps incorporate the narration with your recordings to make the podcast more engaging and a smoother experience for the viewers.