The trailblazing Hong Kong director Tsui Hark is now working in China: his new comedy hit All About Women shows just how far one can go with a synthesis of Chinese contemporary dazzle and Hong Kong movie stylishness. It’s always fascinating to watch a great director like Tsui evolve from his early genre-busting comedy work in Hong Kong in the 1980s through his reinvention of crime and ghost films in the late 80s early 90s, to the current reconfiguration of his energy and vision in a sustained, zany, manic confrontation with early 21st century mainland Chinese pop culture.
The new film’s screenplay is a noteworthy collaboration between Tsui and Korean writer/director Kwak Jae-yong, whose hit comedy My Sassy Girl played here at FEFF 2002. All About Women is all about three fabulous movie stars: Zhou Xun, China’s greatest young actress (currently also starring at FEFF 2009 in The Equation Of Love And Death) plays Ou Fanfan, a medical technologist at Beijing Accuracy Clinic. Hiding behind superfat glasses and the mousiest hair and wardrobe imaginable, Fanfan is a love-obsessed, terminally awkward though brilliant young researcher who freezes up, even on the dance floor, at the touch of a man (she self-diagnoses with “selective sclerosis”). Inspired by a certain love-desperation to experiment with pheromones, she hits on a magic formula that, applied to little patches she fixes on her body, magically turns men into ravenous and willing lovers. Tang Lu, the second women in the trio, needs no such pharmacological support. As played by the impressive young mainland star Kitty Zhang (made famous in Stephen Chow’s CJ7), her overwhelming gorgeousness slays men on the spot. They tend to burst into flame when singed by one of her smouldering glances. This results in conflict at work, since she’s a high-powered executive at a technology investment company who wants to be valued for her brilliance more than her looks. Superstar number three is Taiwanese heartthrob Guey Lun-mei (from Jay Chou’s Secret), who plays here against her usual sweet, soulful silent-girl type. She is a wild rock’n rolling, heavy metal chick Tie Ling, who writes internet novels and practices boxing in her spare time. Her constant (imaginary) sidekick is her dream boyfriend “X” (Chinese model Godfrey Kao, implausibly handsome), an evergreen popstar whom she imagines as her boyfriend, musical inspiration, and guardian angel.
Tsui Hark takes these three vibrant characters and whips them into his typically hyper-energetic fricassee of light, colour, and ultra-high speed comedy/romance. Fanfan pheromonically lures soulful rocker Xiaogang (young HK actor/director Stephen Fung) into her bed, upsetting Tie Feng, who has agreed to be in his band and now feels ignored. Handsome, retiring Mo Qiyan (played by yet another attractive new Taiwanese star, Eddie Peng) has fallen in love with Tie Feng. He is personal assistant to business barracuda Tang Lu, who meanwhile contrives a giddily complex plan involving Tie Ling, Fan Fan, and “X” to seduce super-inventor Wu (played by, you guessed it, handsome HK heartthrob Alex Fong) to let her company exploit his latest invention.
Dizzy? In Tsui Hark’s comedy world, things don’t necessarily make sense, but that’s the point. His brilliance has been to bring pure film values: speed, light, colour, out-of-this-world visual invention to his omnivorous creative appetite. Here, applying the Tsui touch to Beijing, he creates the first truly post-Olympics ultra-modern image of China’s premiere city as the capital of a 21st century virtual urban space. It’s a space where gender wars are played out with spirit and sizzle, between powerful, brilliant, hilarious, sublimely beautiful woman and the hapless men who can only sit back, entranced, defeated, and uplifted in this most unfair of competitions.
Shelly Kraicer