Abstract The name Queen’s Bench III (1990) signifies that the criminal case in this film is tried in the High Court of Justice within the English legal system. Moreover, its Cantonese title 古惑(or蠱惑, gu2 waak6)大律師 (A Mischievous Lawyer. Gǔ huò dà lǜ shī in Mandarin) refers to the characteristics of the protagonist, Zhang, a Hong Kong barrister, who is resourceful and full of unexpected legal tricks. On the night before Chen Tsu Hui (陳子輝), a local hooligan, is set to move to the U.S., he secretly meets his lover, Ms Chen, who is engaged to a wealthy man. On his way back home, he finds an unconscious girl, who has been choked and raped by the son of the village leader, Li Fan Gen (李範根). She is close to death, and so he performs CPR. However, the villagers, misunderstanding the scene, believe he is molesting the girl. They arrest and beat him and then send him to the police station. Chen Tsu Hui is subsequently charged with murder after the girl dies in hospital. Barrister Zhang accepts a pro bono offer from the government to be Chen Tsu Hui’s defence lawyer. Since Chen Tsu Hui has an ignominious life record and the true culprit imputes guilt to Chen Tsu Hui for his crime, Chen Tsu Hui looks to be losing the court case, despite the excellent performance of his lawyer, Barrister Zhang. Therefore, Barrister Zhang decides to falsify a film on VHS using CCTV (not prevalent in the early 90s), in which someone is violating the victim according to the culprit’s description of the crime scene. Ultimately, the culprit confesses that it was he who killed the girl. The truth is phenomenological. At the moment something happens, the truth is open to interpretation. The truth of something can only be understood in a historical context. As Gadamer says, “understanding is, essentially, a historically effected event”. That is to say, the truth is only a logical product made by our minds, as Vaihingar says, “our subject is the active activity of the logical function; the products of this activity—fictions.” In this paper, I will examine the connection between truth and fiction in Queen’s Bench III , represented by a videotape as visual evidence, in which a fiction that imitates the truth is the truth of the case that has been lost.
Lung-Lung Hu (Mon,) studied this question.