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27th Hong Kong International
Film Festival 2003
by Alison Jobling
Episode 2 - Girly pictures
"What, no Andy no moaning?" Yep, I'm afraid that's about the
size of it. And that single fact would have killed any chance of me
becoming a gum gai, or golden chicken (Canto slang for prostitute): if I
don't get Andy Lau, or a respectable substitute, there'll be no moaning
from me.
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The same could not be said of Sandra Ng, the star of Golden
Chicken. No, she leaps the fence at which I would have
balked, and manages some champion moaning, thanks perhaps to Andy's
inspired coaching. And what a fine way to start this week's episode,
dealing with films featuring prominent female characters: moaning
along with Andy. Warm, surprising, funny, educational: this film's
got it all. I liked it so much I, errr, wrote a review
about it. |
The extremely talented Sandra Ng shows up again, this time in a serious
role. Thunder Cops II, screened as part of the Jeff Lau
retrospective, follows devoted cop Ng as she trails the criminal who
killed her father. What sets this film apart from so many other cop movies
of the eighties are the performances.
| Ng's character is quite unlike the ditzy comedienne roles she was
given so often, and she eats it up: she plays a cop driven to
extremes, and dealing harshly with anyone who crosses her path.
Similarly, Stephen Chiau Sing Chi, as the lame brother of minor
gangster Shing Fui On, sheds his own comic persona to present a
sidelined player who refuses to aid Ng in her quest. Supporting
these two are Ann Bridgewater, stunning as a junkie informer, Lam
Siu Lau, as Ng's never-say-die partner, and Jeff Lau, utterly
repugnant as the commanding officer who frames Ng for drug-dealing. |
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The whole cast must have dined daily on gravel, so gritty are the
performances. Not an easy film to watch, but compelling, and with a
smashing scene which allowed Ng to get her hands on Chiau's undergarments.
Alas that she was kept busy removing a bullet from his thigh, and so
couldn't properly enjoy the moment.
From moaning for money or cutting out bullets, we go to a collection of
films that represent what could be called one of women's traditional
roles, albeit treated in a very non-traditional way. For most of the
history of film-making, women have often been portrayed as either sex
objects or part of a romantic couple.The four remaining films explore the
emotional/sexual aspect of the cinematic image of women in wildly
different ways, with highly varied results.
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First up to bat will be Snake Of June, a Japanese film.
Perhaps that simple phrase, "a Japanese film", is all
that's necessary for you to make some guess about this film, and
you'd be right. Perhaps you might need more clues, such as the blurb
in the festival programme, that murmurs, "It's the rainy
season, and the clammy air oozes with sticky vibes of lust. Rinko,
30, silk skin glistening with sweat, is hot for love, but can't get
it from her fat, bald, cleanness-freak husband", and claims
that the director "slithers into that quivering space between
art and erotica to revive animal instincts stifled by the concrete
jungle." |
Astonishingly, to me at least, this film won the Grand Jury Prize at
Venice in 2002, which might just indicate that the Venitians need to get
out more. But whatever critics think of this film, I found it to be fairly
typical weird Japanese stuff: sex, odd segues that go nowhere, and more
sex. Odd sex. I'm not sure how the director managed to find an actor to
play Rinko's husband who looked so frighteningly like Henry Kissinger. I'm
not sure how the lovely Rinko managed to get herself married to such a
ghastly man at all. I'm not sure why he shuddered into such paroxysms of
horrified delight while cleaning the hair out of the drain in the tub,
although if anyone out there can empathise, I'm happy to provide a drain
that could delight you for hours.
Above all, I'm not sure why, for ten-odd minutes in the middle, the
film suddenly came over all Jeunet-et-Caro (the guys who made
Delicatessen and City Of Lost Children). I mean honestly, there
we were, happily watching Mr Clean Kissinger get a kicking in a deserted
alley, and suddenly there's conical facemasks, a big fish tank, and all
sorts of odd goings-on. I'm tempted to pronounce Snake Of June this
year's winner of the Tokyo X Erotica medal, for most ridiculous sex
film at the fest.
| It would have been simpler, and much nicer for all concerned, if
the lovely Rinko could have managed to emulate the star of the Thai
film One Night Husband, and just lose the non-kissing
Kissinger. It might have made the Japanese film as intriguing as its
Thai counterpart. The story begins with the wedding night of Sipang,
a confident career woman, whose husband Napat receives a phone call
during the night and disappears. The rest of the film follows Sipang
in her quest to find the errant husband. |
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Careless, you might think, to just lose a husband so easily, and a
brand new one at that. You might be right, but you'd also, like me, be
slowly wound into the mystery of where the naughty man went. Along the
way, Sipang meets Napat's brother, and becomes friendly with the brother's
wife, a quiet, almost housebound girl. This blossoming of female
friendship is one of the finer points of this film. The fact that the
friendship mostly survives the final revelations makes for a superb
addition to the female friendship genre. This was director Pimpaka
Towira's first feature film, and it's a remarkably strong debut.
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The lovely Rinko would even have been better off copying her
Korean counterpart from the Byun Young Joo film, Ardor. The
heroine and her husband move to a sleepy Korean village after the
husband's mistress clocks the heroine over the head, causing an
injury that provokes constant headaches. The shock of discovering
that her perfect marriage wasn't so perfect, and the slow recovery
from the head injury, combine with the headaches to turn our heroine
into a woman cut off from the world: she refuses to talk, she can't
smile, and finds the simplest tasks unmanageable. Enter the hero, a
handsome doctor, who proposes a game in which they indulge each
other sexually for three months but don't engage emotionally. |
Not a bad offer, you might think, and clearly it persuaded our heroine.
And although the Reader's Digest might try to convince you that laughter
is the best medicine, what works for our girl is sex. Lashings of it. As a
result, she comes back to life, interacting normally with others, even
making some friends. You might want to give it a try next time you're
feeling under the weather. It's not all roses and bonking, though, as they
inevitably fall heavily and painfully in love. And in that case, it's
bound to end in tragedy, although our Korean Madame Bovary survives,
learns, and goes out into the world, older and wiser.
| The ultimate winner in the love-lost-now-what's-left competition
is Ryu, the central character in the Japanese film Woman Of Water.
Ryu, played by UA (yes, I know, but it's her name apparently), is a
rain woman, and so every time something important happens in her
life, it rains. Buckets down. And when her father dies, Ryu takes
over the family bathhouse, and in time hires the arsonist Yusaku,
played deliciously by Asano Tadanobu (of Ichi The Killer
infamy). To tend the boiler, no less, and no snickering from the
back. |
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The imagery throughout was beautiful: rural Japan outside, rain-wet
forests and fields, and traditional wooden housing inside, calm and
simple. The bathhouse, old and ordinary though it was, provided a lovely
setting for the interactions of the various characters, while the wall
mural of Mount Fuji, renewed annually, gave both a backdrop for scenes and
an excuse for a short scene of its own. And throughout the film, all the
subordinate characters treated Ryu as a member of the community, tied to
all of them in some way. This in turn probably foreshadowed the ending,
and painted a picture of a strong woman with her own place in the world,
who takes what she wants and remains undamaged.
I was quite pleased with most of these films, showing as they did the
abilities of various women to deal with ordinary and extraordinary
situations. From moaning to kicking and back to moaning, our girls tackled
their crises and survived, demonstrating the falseness of the cinematic,
and social, assumption that women aren't strong, capable, or even
interesting enough to be main characters. In these films, it's the men who
are marginalised: from the powerless and cowardly Chiau character in
Thunder Cops II to the missing husband in One Night Husband,
these men don't control the action, and are not as fully drawn as their
female counterparts.
Next week, we love 'em and lose 'em. Stock up on tissues.
H E R O I C * C I N E M A
http://www.heroic-cinema.com
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