Richard Linklater’s 2001 movie Tape, and Stephen Belber’s 1999 play that preceded it, were ahead of the curve in their targeting of male sexual violence, blurred lines of consent, performative apologies and self-victimising aggressors. Now comes a remake from Hong Kong for the post-#MeToo era. It makes a few updates, such as situating the film in an Airbnb apartment (instead of a motel room), where two old high-school friends convene. But, somewhat too reverential towards the original, this new version from director Bizhan Tong doesn’t do enough either conceptually or aesthetically to dig down into today’s shifted gender battle lines.
In Tong’s scenario, flippant lifeguard and small-time drug-dealer Wing (Adam Pak) invites his straight-laced school buddy Chong (Kenny Kwan) over to shoot the breeze at his apartment. Initially they smoke spliffs and banter testily about their diverging life paths; the latter, now going by the anglicised name of Jon, has become a promising low-budget film-maker. But steering the conversation to a touchy subject – Wing’s former sweetheart Amy (Selena Lee), whom Jon later slept with – Wing goads his so-called friend into confessing he raped her. Then he delivers the coup de grace: the room has been sprinkled with webcams that have videoed their exchange.
Linklater’s 2001 film used digital video to invasively probe the room, and pointedly employed the new technology to interrogate the cultural moment when barriers between public and private identities were breaking down. The questions in the new film are the same: is Jon inwardly remorseful or only serving up contrition because he realises his alleged crime can be exposed? Is Wing really interested in justice or somehow making amends for his own alluded-to transgressions? But apart from effectively using lighting to demarcate the phases of their verbal duel, Tong’s blandly shot film doesn’t have the salient visual vocabulary of Linklater’s.
Tong’s biggest innovation is to bookend the film with flashbacks to the night in question – though these lessen the critical unknowability at the heart of Belber’s play. This issue comes to the fore when Amy enters the room and refuses to disclose whether she was violated. While the evasiveness may have seemed a devious philosophical gambit in 2001, in our current fraught climate, in which victims of male violence are far more vocal, it plays like a slightly fatuous parlour game. Tong nods to #MeToo in a new speech acknowledging rape stigma in Asia, though you wonder how a bolder reworking might have overhauled Amy’s role more successfully.
But even though this revival doesn’t fully capture the present moment, the ferocious source material still has an innate grip.
Tape is released in cinemas on 19 September
