Jason says: “WOMEN
WHO FLIRT (or, to use its full Chinese name, ‘Women Who Know How to
Flirt Are the Luckiest’) teeters on the edge of being the sort of
romantic comedy that doesn’t respect its primary target audience of
women much at all, depicting them as all about landing a man via
manipulation, even when theoretically trying to say the opposite. Even
when ‘two girls fight over a guy’ mostly works, as it does here, a more
progressive or individual story might be nice.
“The guy is ‘Marco’ Gong Xiao (Huang Xiaoming), a nice-enough seeming
Shanghai lad who works with long-time friend ‘Angie’ Zhang Hui (Zhou
Xun); she has had a crush on him since at least college but never made
a move because he didn’t plan to date until he could provide for his
father. That changes when he comes back from a trip to Taiwan with
Hailey (Sonia Sui Ta), a pretty young thing who seemed to flirt her way
into Marco’s life in a way that doesn’t come naturally to the
straightforward Angie. Fortunately for her, her best friend May (Xie
Yilin) knows this stuff cold, and her ‘Barbie Army’ is there to help.
“In a lot of ways, WOMEN WHO FLIRT director Pang Ho-cheung doesn’t
stray far from that romantic comedy template of the girl unpretentious
enough to be just one of the guys having to figure out how to beat one
who instinctually knows how to use her feminine wiles at her own game.
That costs the movie at times; Angie, Marco, and Hailey don’t
differentiate themselves that much from other versions of the
Cinderella story enough for their individual actions to be the source
of much suspense or surprise, even if some of the details are clever or
funny. The movie is heading toward a fairly predestined end, although
it deserves a bit of credit for the way it handles some of the stops
along the way.
“Actually, it handles a lot of stops along the way well. Consider how
Pang punctuates the movie with a series of dinner dates Angie and Marco
share – there are four or five in all, staged differently enough that
the pattern isn’t necessarily obvious, but they all say something about
them. The second, where Angie meets Hailey for the first time, is kind
of ingenious for how well it builds Hailey’s ‘bitch who must be
destroyed’ bona fides despite her not displaying any of the obvious
malice Angie is. He and his crew tie things together in ways that seem
to reinforce each other, like the visual link between Angie’s notebook
scribblings and Ju Ming, a sculptor she greatly admires.
“Pang and his co-writers don’t get the chance to be quite so weird or
blue in this Mandarin-language movie as they do in their Hong
Kong-based efforts, which is a bit of a shame – a joke about how Angie
got Marco’s father porn for his birthday seems like the start of a riff
from the maker of VULGARIA,
but it doesn’t exactly launch from there. Still, the script does
occasionally have some teeth and also goes to weird and/or clever
places – Pang will do things like drop a clangingly obvious GHOST
reference early on that disguises just how peculiar the later riff on
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY is. The big romantic speech at the end
seems entirely wrong-headed, but it kind of works even if it isn’t
guided to the right place. If Angie and Marco start out kind of stupid
about each other, and that’s part of the appeal of the pair, they
should maybe remain kind of stupid about each other.
“That can work, after all, if funny people are portraying them, as is
the case. Zhou Xun isn’t always perfectly charming as Angie – there are
moments when her awkwardness is not the adorable type and it’s not
clear that’s what she and Pang are going for – but she can light up the
screen when the time is right even while getting barbed jokes in
without sounding glib. Huang Xiaoming plays off her well, especially in
casual moments or flashbacks to the characters’ college days (enough so
that one goofy scene can show why Angie is so hung up on Marco without
a heartfelt explanation), and can sell jokes quite well indeed. Sonia
Su Ta makes for a fine rival, with the silliness of Hailey working
equally well viewed at face value and as a ploy. And Xie Yilin is an
MVP as May, making all sorts of the jokes awful people make but showing
just enough loyalty to Angie that we can laugh without diminishing her
tartness. They do give her too many sidekicks, though – the Barbie Army
is two kind of funny jokes, but four of these girls don’t work as well
as one in most scenes.
“I must admit, I kind of wonder what a Cantonese, Hong Kong-set WOMEN
WHO FLIRT would be like – this one occasionally seems to be held back a
bit. This one is better than it first appears to be, at least, maybe
not quite subverting the formula it’s built on, but often having the
brains to tweak it while still getting laughs from the parts that work.
3.9 cats
“Seen 26 November 2014 at Regal Fenway #9 (first-run, DCP)” |
