Returning to cover social issues after a couple of early-1970s commercial pictures, Patrick Lung Kong managed a bold story of sex workers in The Call Girls. Held up before release after alarming the censor, the movie follows women working across all social strata. Cilla offers high-class service from home and her love life is taking a turn for the ugly. Another high-society call girl, Liza, finds herself in awkward run-ins with upper-crust ladies, most notably at a garden party crowded with two-faced clients. Dirt-poor Pai Lu works brutal hours in a brothel while her hubby’s health is fading back at the village. Fourth girl Hui-ying gets hooked on drugs, falls pregnant, then finds help through a church. And another younger lady, Shao-fong, flits about with hoodlums and is forced into vice.
Not simply an anthology picture, The Call Girls frames the women’s stories around television as a narrative device. A fictitious Society and You talk show introduces an advocate for legalising prostitution, explains pertinent legal points and dishes up a series of vox pops that expose the general public’s double standards and cynicism vis-à-vis the sex trade. The quantity of stories to tell and issues to deal with calls for dynamic staging, so scenes are often rapidly crosscut, leaping between the various protagonists and TV footage. Lung Kong draws heavily on Hong Kong’s great melodrama tradition, not least in the story starring Tina Chin (in which he co-stars as her ill husband), and updates it with gripping additions like a cliff-top demolition derby.
Exemplifying the director’s desire to blend the commercial aims of pop cinema with investigations of pressing public concerns, The Call Girls can verge on the sensational. One woman gives birth in a hotel bathroom, another has rich women strip her at a fashion show. But the sex-industry angle doesn’t mean viewers should expect racy bedroom scenes. As with the best Hong Kong sex-worker pictures made since, from Lawrence Lau’s Queen Of Temple Street in 1990 to Herman Yau’s True Women For Sale in 2008, the movie is focused on developing each character. When that means more space for Lung Kong to depict and comment on the societal and moral issues surrounding the women’s trade, their customers and those who live off them or live with them, The Call Girls is all the richer for it.
Originally a Mandarin-language release, the film was re-released in Cantonese in 1984.