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Film and Constitutional Controversy Johnnie To’s Justice, My Foot!*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2021
In Chapter 2, I situate Johnnie To’s popular comedy, Justice, My Foot! (1992 審死官), which revolves around a lawyer defending a woman falsely accused of murdering her husband, in light of the drafting of the Basic Law and passage of the Bill of Rights in early-1990s Hong Kong. I argue that To’s film, which appeared at cinemas a mere three years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing, can be approached as a screening of a nightmare scenario on the minds of many viewers at the time: A Hong Kong-style lawyer trying to defend the innocent and maintain justice in a Chinese-style legal system that disregards basic human rights and that is plagued by corruption and nepotism. I will then explore the function of humor in the film to show how Justice, My Foot! repackages anxieties about the sinicization of law into a marketable cultural product for mass consumption.
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