Life Without Principle: “I Understand Completely”

It is both grimly amusing and frankly unsurprising that the entire global economic system again seems on the verge of collapse, à la 2008’s global financial crisis and a modern-day update of the Great Depression’s mass struggle of living conditions – also a global phenomenon, with myriad repercussions for the century to follow. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of an ever-shrinking few¹ and the old narrative that growing personal holdings is not only doable, but one lucky day away is laughable. 

Instead, trying to squeeze money wherever possible is the name of the game. Johnnie To’s 2011 thriller Duet ming gam (Life Without Principle) borrows its title from Henry David Thoreau’s 1983 anti-materialist essay – in which he decried the constant funneling of human lives towards the production of business and profit – and literally takes these ideas to the bank. The film focuses on three interlinked professionals, each of whom illustrate the absurd dependence on money faced by people at every strata of society. The first is Teresa (Denise Ho), a mutual fund sales clerk tasked with attracting potential customers towards a high-risk BRIC fund investment. One of her clients is a loan shark for a local gangster, Panther (Lau Ching-wan), who finds himself going straight into the bail money-to-gambling pipeline when one of his partners in crime is arrested by the final member of the triad, Inspector Cheung (Richie Jen). He’s got wallet problems too, and is attempting to buy a new flat with his wife in an ever-more volatile housing market. 

Life Without Principle expertly uses this storied hyperlink format to convey what a MacGuffin all of this present (and presumed) money traded by both “legitimate” and underworld figures turns out to be. Originally defined by film critic Alissa Quart,² hyperlink cinema weaves together multiple storylines to create an interconnected narrative tapestry – in this case that of the triad, and interlaces their stories through a shared pursuit of money. The characters’ mutual desire for wealth would initially seem to place the film apart from the idea of the MacGuffin, “an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself.”³ But the ideal of financial and social security that binds these people together is rendered increasingly unattainable by all sorts of benchmarks and requirements, ultimately revealing itself to be antithetical to the prospect of a life of non-exploitative relationships outside market-based, hierarchical social structures. One of the film’s salient theses is its exposure of this harsh reality. Nothing – not a respectable middle-class job like Teresa’s, nor a profession based on supposedly “objective” ideas of right and wrong like the Inspector’s, nor even a position ostensibly outside the entire system such as Panther’s in underworld hierarchies – can save someone from participation in this system of monetary extraction. 

As Inspector Cheung makes an arrest early in the film, we hear two tenants arguing about owing two months’ rent. The high rise in which Cheung’s wife wants to rent is a paradoxical exemplar of both prosperity and scarcity: Cheung worries that “we can’t afford it in the future,” so they may as well buy now; meanwhile, the real estate agent consistently chimes in with competing offers. The same tactics are duplicated in Teresa’s office, where her boss pits employees against each other through a public listing of sales performance rankings, which she turns into nothing more than a humiliation ritual by warning anyone who doesn’t meet their quota figure of the consequences they’ll suffer. 

It’s not immediately clear where their directions come from, only that Teresa and her boss are receiving them from yet another ambiguous high-on-up source, and are then expected as an organisation to implement these orders as if they’re inevitable. Versions of this forced compliance – such as the scene where an elderly woman must pay a 20% deposit fee simply for having a large bag of coins – brings to mind the incremental monetisation of so many formerly-free goods and services, a now-commonplace element of society that To predicts here. 

One of the best-known tropes associated with crime dramas is the abrupt beginning in medias res, that then flashes back in order to reveal “how we got here.” Life Without Principle’s precise, methodical screenplay – written by the creative team at To’s production company Milkyway Image – charts the process of money and assets constantly being packaged and marketed as a securing of one’s future. Denise Ho is spectacular as the canny Teresa; she absolutely sells the soul-crushing nature of someone whose professional life is filled to the brim with financial grift. Ho is a master of tone and line delivery – with obfuscating language, she rattles off lists of possible future investment benefits that are clearly well-earned tricks of the trade. Prolonged scenes of Teresa wheeling and dealing expose this everyday hucksterdom at work on vulnerable populations, all based on some overall concept of “the market” as the most important game to play.

To’s insistence on showing the tedious minutiae of Teresa’s client-facing interactions makes clear that she is doing immoral, unprincipled work even before the prospect of further riches. What’s even clearer, however, is the narrative’s refusal to overtly shame and dehumanise her. Life Without Principle does not necessarily suggest that Teresa should have quit or stood up for herself – few people have this luxury. Instead, reality is spotlighted: the system itself is inextricably linked with the performance of immoral labour for the sake of unseeable profits, only trackable by figures and vague promises of future benefit.

One of the greatest ways To demonstrates the human cost of this hustling is through the key supporting role of Cheng Siu-kuen, performed brilliantly by the late So Hang-Shuen. Siu-kuen is a retired senior who comes in wanting to secure her future through the investment model. Instead, Teresa sells her on the high-risk, supposedly high-reward mutual fund, which later ends up tanking. Watching Teresa persuade her is a car-wreck in slow motion; the tired look on Siu-kuen’s face betrays a lifetime of hard survival and endurance. She could be one of the millions who put their faith in the supposedly trustworthy system of high finance, only to suffer the most when that system completely melts down. As The Asian Cinema Critic observes, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps or The Big Short…those stories centres [sic] on the lives of the brokers and bankers, but many of the lives most affected [by the 2008 global financial crisis] were everyday people, barely scraping by as it was.”⁴ The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013) might as well be added to this; its gaudy visual excess finds its opposite in Life Without Principle’s warm, naturalistic cinematography and incorporation of how the financial crisis affected those nearer the bottom of the hierarchy. 

There’s very little sense of visual flourish or dramatic lighting in Life Without Principle. The unadorned presentation of each setting – whether streets, a banquet hall, or Teresa’s bank – becomes central to the narrative’s realism as it shifts to the third story, of gangster Panther and his various compatriots. Panther’s group is not a hyper-violent crime syndicate; they are affable human beings who have ordinary conversations, such as how many banquet plates they can afford for a birthday party celebration. With the entrance of this third set of protagonists, the film becomes an integrated narrative where characters from all three storylines begin to walk in and out as the situation develops. The loan shark and reliable customer Chung Yuen (a superb and slimy Lo Hoi-pang) is, fittingly, the principal character that connects the various subplots. As someone who possesses both money and a manipulative understanding of its allure to those who desperately require it, he is the only one able to pass through all three stories – though admittedly at great cost. 

Ironically, between the three protagonists, Panther is the most avid about trying to value his loyalty above money within the old-school codes of criminal syndicates. But when he insists that “loyalty matters most”, he’s met with his friend Sam’s realisation that “money matters more than loyalty.” This is followed by a scene of the duo trying to reorganise a stack of flattened cardboard – the latter’s strait-laced income source is a profitable line of trade echoed in the Kim family’s struggle to fold pizza boxes to the proper standard in Gisangcheung (Parasite, Bong Joon Ho, 2019). 

In 2011, plenty of critics found the film convoluted by a meandering plot and unconnected stories. These criticisms are understandable to an extent, but To’s attention to background detail and sound design provides a number of stylistic grace notes, building tension with every new incident which piles up like a Jenga tower. The near-complete lack of incidental music and a series of background news soundbites provide updates on the financial crisis. Uniformly, the news anchors’ insipid recitation of figures reveal that “there is still confidence in the market,” and headlines reading “HK monetary authority believes low interest rates will continue, US economy is making slow recovery.” I was irresistibly reminded of the breathless reportage coming out of the US Federal Reserve in the autumn and winter of 2025⁵  about the constant cutting of interest rate percentages which, it was claimed, should help spur consumers – all in conjunction with skyrocketing prices from Trump’s administrative tariffs and budgets spent overwhelmingly on both domestic and international branches of military-industrial repression.⁶

Life Without Principle brings to mind one of my favourite Tamil films, Aayutha Ezhuthu (Mani Ratnam, 2004) – also a hyperlink thriller that showcases three interconnected characters crossing paths during an inciting incident that irrevocably changes their lives. These two films are remarkably similar in their chronology: two-thirds are spent on how the three main characters ended up in their present-day situation, before using the climax/denouement to move forward. While Aayutha Ezhuthu leaves its viewer with a sense of idealistic optimism, Life Without Principle makes Pyrrhic triumph at cheating the financial system into its own kind of weary victory lap. Its ludicrous, sad ending comes full circle as the bank keeps reciting its questionnaires about same-day index futures and exploiting their customers’ desperate need for money. While the bank, it seems, is always able to grift and recoup its own profit, it’s every individual citizen for themself. 

Throughout the film, the viewer is treated to recurring images of money printed en masse. It’s a reminder of how constructed all the elements of this financial world are, only deemed worthy or unworthy based on whether a select group has assigned value to so many pieces of paper. It’s a question that has aged bitterly well in the age of digital currency and supposedly secure, decentralised banking. In 2012, Tim Jackson noted this popular sentiment in his review of the film, stating, “How secure are our principles when survival and security are on the line, when fast profit stock trading, gambling, loan sharking, criminal and white-collar corruption, and the uncertainties of a global economy affect the chance for a secure future?”⁷ These concerns have become easily replaceable with the present-day bubbles of the AI and data centre industries, prediction markets (such as refined algorithmic gambling), and Ponzi-like crypto schemes. In a tapestry of manifestations of its own title, Life Without Principle showcases how these upperworld patterns keep repeating – and how the everyday person might go about spotting them. 

Duet ming gam/Life Without Principle (2011 Hong Kong 107 mins)

Prod Co: Media Asia Films/Milkyway Image Prod, Dir: Johnnie To Scr: Au Kin-yee, Ben Wong, Milkyway Creative Team Phot: Cheng Siu-Keung Ed: Allen Leung Mus: Yue Wei Prod Des, Art Dir, Cos Des: Sukie Yip

Cast: Lau Ching-Wan, Richie Jen, Denise Ho, Myolie Wu, Lo Hoi-Pang, So Hang-Shuen, Philip Keung, Eddie Cheung, Felix Wong, Wong Chi-Yin, Stephanie Che, J.J. Jia, Yoyo Chen, Terence Yin, Bing-Man Tam, Lee Siu-Kay, Frankie Chi-Hung Ng, Law Wing-Cheong, Vincent Sze, Anson Leung

Endnotes