I do not think it is by chance that Cherie arrives after The Sword, Burning Snow and Nomad: in the middle of the 1980s, following a violent statement of identity by the author regarding the New Wave and his intentions with three movies that on one side act as theoretical manuals of an imaginary idea and thought, and on the other side tend to decline genres which are well-known and defined (the wuxia, the thriller, the generational drama) with innovative stylistic solutions. A dichotomy, then, that Tam decides to entrust to a comedy, a very trendy genre at the time, and even more, to one of the top majors, Shaw Brothers, still flying high. Blended with fantasy and action, there is the comedy (and the zany one) that in the 80s works as a battlefield for talents of various greatness. However, one cannot underestimate the pressure coming from the Studios, that want to launch properly the two stars, one already quite known (Cherie Chung Cho-hung) and the other still growing (Tony Leung Ka-fai). And Cherie is, in fact, a showcase for the two interpreters, carefully set to put the beauty of each one in the perfect light (Chung’s breasts briefly glimpsed, Leung’s round posterior) and to present them correctly (Billy Wong Chung-bo’s photography is well aware to the point of being naughty: note the cut of shadow on Chung’s nipples when she is at the window).
Light, it must be said, that for Tam is really a matter of war. At all times. And it is in fact in the dark of the night, maybe in a moonlight shadow and a starry sky (that Cherie and Hua admire from a meadow), and in broad daylight, sunny, like the final scene on the beach, that a true battle of the sexes takes place. With the tones of slapstick, and even of zany comedy agreed, but not surprising nevertheless is the epitome almost funerary that unfolds by the ocean’s shore in the ending, not after Nomad anyway: Cherie closes with comical mechanisms, but recuperates the unexpected and bewildering violence of the previous movie, to turn it upside down “with the best intentions”; that afterwards, in that beautiful close-up of Chung smiling freezed by the credits, offshore on a boat, cannot avoid more pessimistic meditations on the roles and the inevitable destiny of the individual - intended as a persona naturally attracted by another persona - in modern society. Mutatis mutandis, comes to mind the shot-reverse shot with Gong Li at the end of Mann’s Miami Vice. In Cherie the role-play, that since the dawn of cinema mirrors the hermeneutic restlessness, is symptomatic of a problem without solution, if not to the point of being selfdestruction that eventually translates itself into exile. All three characters, Cherie, Hua e Chou, truly harm themselves to achieve their goals. At the end, first they are compelled to abandon civilization and go to a deserted shore, and then, they are defeated (even Cherie Teng) by themselves and by their own actions (and those they have been compelled to take). The woman’s escape into the sea is not fully “luminous”; while the collapse of the two men that drop on the ground in pure slapstick style make you smile but bitterly.
It is when the movie describes the distortion of, let’s say civil, expectations from the sexes that it reaches the highest efficacy. It is then that one understands that something is wrong in the characters’ behavior (which reflects something grotesquely brute in ours) that Cherie launches an SOS. In this context, then, little matter the sketches, at times functional, (the timing perfection of the editing at the residence, when an impassive Chou hides from Cherie the naked body of Hua using doors, panels, windows and curtains), at times less (the entrance of the cousin in the house at the beginning, with the friend Lucy in the bathroom; the Spanish fly; the tedious petty quarrel at the snack bar, when Chou swears he became poor). Cherie touches raw nerves, those of sexual traditionalism but, most importantly, those even more sensitive of predictability of events. By which, not only to an action should correspond a reaction, but a feeling, even sincere and passionate, should be followed by a similar feeling, or at least a human one. Instead, the characters in Cherie beat each other up and study the details of a duel which is first a duel of bodies, before it is of souls. Which, it has to be said, lack depth. Survival instincts and possessive childish drive of reaching a wish that move Cherie Teng, Hua e Chou. For them, romantic tension is simply mathematics: I see, I want, I must have; if then I want no more, because interests won’t allow me to (see Hua), it is over and done. Correct additions, foreseeable solutions. The problem, and Tam, also in light of Nomad, knows it well, is that such a titans’ war (intended not as individuals but as feelings) cannot bring anywhere but to disaster. Better: to loneliness close to (post)apocalypse. The final landscape, indeed, resembles a post-atomic place. The cinema of the Hong Kong director is made of unexpected swerves and constant accelerations and decelerations; even more, and especially because it is an often demential comedy, Cherie proceeds by fits and starts saving nobody, neither the woman nor the man, both apparent signs of a social and cultural stiffening and of a methodological and ontological impasse. They all come out of it tired: one because of blatantly avid aversion (the friend Lucy), one for pedestrian affectivity (Chou), one for selfish social climbing (Hua) and one for excessive self-confidence (Cherie). It is not easy to approach Cherie because too much is asked from the audience, even those who are familiar with the roughness (yet in some way “understandable” because proper of defined genres such as the noir or the police dramas) of Hong Kong cinema of that time. And we should not be surprised if among the scriptwriters we read the name of Roy Szeto Cheuk-hon whose name is closely linked to the blackest zone of the former British colony’s cinema, from Dangerous Encounter - 1st Kind e We’re Going to Eat You by Tsui Hark to Blade of Fury by Sammo Hung. But one should keep in mind that among Szeto’s works, there are also the scripts of John Woo’s To Hell with the Devil and Ricky Lau’s Mr. Vampire. Black humor and paradoxes, then, should not surprise anybody; amazement, on the contrary, results from the application to something common of something surreal that transforms it into something absolutely indecipherable. Patrick Tam’s cinema is useful for this reason as well: to break what one thinks as known, if not predictable (such as the to and fro of romantic comedies); including enjoyment and expectations of the audience.
Not an operation as an end in itself, but the offer of a forerunning alternative to common moral sense.