Friday, March 29, 2019

Aorm Aok Jao Praya - Arunya Narmwong (1972) - View over Wanchai, Hong Kong

Aorm Aok Jao Praya (Thai: อ้อมอกเจ้าพระยา) is a Thai film made in 1972 and partially filmed in Hong Kong. I was first told about the film several years ago by Regis Madec who runs the ThaiWorldView website, it's just taken me a long time to get around to buying a copy (available here). So many thanks to him for making me aware of this.

The film centres around a girl (Arunya Narmwong) who is from a rich family but on a trip to Hong Kong she manages to elude her chaperone to spend some time amongst folks a bit less well off than herself. She pays an old boat woman to pretend to be her mum and then promptly falls in love with a lowly Thai boat captain who is in HK for a few days. Queue attempts by her father and chaperone to get her back. The first half of the film is largely centred on HK locations whereas the second half returns to Thailand as the characters head back to their homeland. There are a few places I've not seen on film before, but let's start off with the usual stuff. The establishing sequence is a quick pan from east to west starting at Happy valley (top image) and finishing looking over towards HMS Tamar (you can just see the naval basin on the far left of the fourth image).

Too much has changed to even start pointing out details, but what some may notice is that the Wanchai seafront reclamation was either still in process, or recently completed. You can see the strip of empty land along the coast. One of the reasons this view has changed so much is that thin strip of newly reclaimed land is now full of skyscrapers.

No comments:

Post a Comment