A stately, handsome World War II drama (the Western equivalent might be a Masterpiece Theatre miniseries), Our Time Will Come drifts among three central characters in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong of the 1940s. Fang Lan (Zhou Xun) is a schoolteacher who gets recruited by the Chinese resistance and rises to become a leader in the underground. Blackie Lau (Eddie Peng) is the guerilla soldier who recruits her, while Gam-wing (Wallace Huo), her boyfriend, stays behind, posing as a collaborator at the service of the Japanese. Director Ann Hui balances elegant landscape compositions with intimate details, such as the early moment where Blackie Lau is carrying the body of a Japanese spy he’s just killed down some stairs and the man’s foot gets stuck in the banister. He gestures for Fang to pull it out, and when she does, it’s framed as her first gesture of resistance. Zhou is fantastic as the schoolteacher-turned-rebel-leader; clearly not content to keep her head down, she’s always peering out of windows to get the lay of the land, even before she officially joins the movement. As Blackie Lau, Peng cuts a charming Robin Hood figure—he almost seems to swing in from a different, lighter movie. But Hui clearly wants to root Our Time Will Come in historical reality, and even bring it into the present everyday. Intermittent, black-and-white, contemporary interview segments feature an older man (Tony Ka Fai Leung) remembering Fang Lan and the resistance, which he was a part of as a boy. These sequences remind us both that history matters and that 2017 Hong Kong, as a special administrative region of China, is still occupied in its own way.
