There’s a sweet charm to Leong Po Chih’s 1986 mystery-comedy Ping Pong, set in and around the restaurant businesses of London’s Chinatown, now rereleased. It was produced by Film Four, who two years later brought out Mike Newell’s comparably set Soursweet, based on the Timothy Mo novel, although that is more serious. Ping Pong is eminently likable, though for me there is something perhaps a little soft-edged and carefully paced which dampens the energy a bit. It is a cheerfully far-fetched caper that could have taken some influence from the Alistair Sim classic Laughter in Paradise, and there’s sharp comment on the racism and enforced invisibility for Chinese communities in Britain, then as now.
Lucy Sheen made her acting debut here as Elaine, a law student who is tasked by the family of Mr Wong, a recently deceased Chinatown restaurateur, with handling his will, which has many eccentric provisions almost designed to promote arguments but also self-examination among the beneficiaries. He divides his restaurant and various assets among the grownup children, in-laws and friends on condition that they continue to run everything in the proper, traditional Chinese way, and that they refrain from their various vices of drinking and gambling. Elaine realises that it might somehow be her job to enforce these strictures. Worryingly, he has also provided for a mysterious Englishwoman called Sarah Lee, whom no one knows anything about but with whom Mr Wong may have had a secret relationship.
