Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong

There’s a lot about Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong that’s familiar. With much of the film made up entirely of conversations between its two main characters, Ruby (Jamie Chung) and Josh (Bryan Greenberg), as they wander around a non-U.S. city, and much of the drama revolving around their unspoken romantic tensions, Emily Ting’s debut feature owes a clear debt to Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy—perhaps too clear. For all the easy chemistry between the two stars (easy, in part, because the two actors are married to each other), their characters feel a bit blander and more generic than Céline and Jesse in Linklater’s films, their dialogue less thoughtful and incisive. And the moments when Ting tries to ramp up the drama, mostly through late-breaking revelations, can’t help but seem artificial in this otherwise naturalistic context, smacking of writer’s contrivance more than anything else.
Nevertheless, Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong charms anyway if you can get onto its swooning romantic-fantasy wavelength. And if the larger story it tells isn’t exactly fresh, Ting peppers her film with enough well-observed details to keep us thematically and emotionally invested. Take, for instance, Ruby’s action of stepping away to secretly take a peek at Josh’s Face-book profile after he sends her a friend request in order to get a glimpse of Josh outside of their two separated-by-one-year nights together—an accurate depiction of the kind of behavior native to our social-media-saturated time.
There’s more to the film’s attention to detail than just such cute topical grace notes, though. Consider the irony of the white American Josh being the one who has lived in Hong Kong for many years and being much more knowledgeable and comfortable with the culture than Ruby, a Chi-nese-American toy designer born and raised in the U.S. who has never learned Cantonese and thus feels ill at ease in the country of her parents’ birth. Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong swims freely in such cultural contradictions, forming the basis of much of the conversation between the two characters. Josh passionately extols Hong Kong’s metropolitan glamour (enchantingly captured by cinematographer Josh Silfen), while Ruby finds it not only alienating, but indicative of a culture she sees as predominantly focused on conspicuous consumption (a perspective Josh doesn’t challenge so much as accept as fact, without judgment).