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All's
Well That Ends Well
viewed March 4, 2000 on video
For full
information about this film, click
here
Believe it or not, this sex-driven Hong Kong
screwball farce has a lot more in common with
Shakespearean comedy than the title. There are
gender games, role reversals, exiles, and below-the-belt
humor of varying subtlety. And finally, a happy
resolution -- a quadruple wedding -- where every
wrong (including homosexual behavior, apparently) is
righted, every stray individual put in their proper
place. Beyond evoking Shakespeare, it also
captures the wacky spirit of the classic Hollywood
comedy better than any Hollywood movie today, including Pretty
Woman, one of several 90s movies it parodies.
But this film is more than one of the most amusing
comedies of the 90s -- it makes a noticeable effort to
say something about the limited roles women are given to
play in modern Hong Kong society.
The story -- and the women -- orbit around a family
of three brothers: a stuffed-shirt salary man, a playboy
(played by Stephen Chiao, the Chinese Jim Carrey), and a
sissy flower arranger (the hilarious Leslie Cheung, who
has remained a superstar across Asia over the last
decade despite being out of the closet). The
salary man enjoys a woman on the side while his hapless
wife cleans the house and tends to her in-laws; the
playboy is eager to share his special "Double
Eiffel Tower Kissing Technique" with an innocent
Hollywood-loving girl (Maggie Cheung, so exquisite)
before moving on to his next conquest; and the sissy
contends with a lesbian massage instructor who has
stolen all of the students from his flower arrangement
class.
This is merely the 20 minute-long set-up before a
storm of hilarity is unleashed, mostly in the form of
the four vindictive women (neglected wife, spoiled
mistress, jilted virgin, aggressive butch) tearing
through the contrary natures of the men's desires.
I found the wife's post-marital resurrection as a
hostess both inspiring and revealing: the traditional
(and still prevailing) allocation of duties -- man as
breadwinner and woman as housewife -- to a deep rift of
understanding between the two... and yet this model of
domestic structure is ultimately reinforced by the
film's end. Even Maggie Cheung's effervescent and
resourceful character, once losing her virtue to Chiao,
has no option but to convert him into husband material.
And so it turns out that the subversion of the
male-oriented world was a transient period of chaos
serving only to reinforce the patriarchy in the
end.
The film also has difficulty figuring out what to do
with the two feuding queer characters -- it only goes as
far as insinuating their orientation through mannerisms
and gender insults that may or may not be taken at face
value. It's rather obvious that the dyke and the
fag will eventually correct each other's aberrant
predispositions, so the film tries in vain to give them
funny things to do until then (a prolonged game of
mahjongg is particuarly pointless). However,
Leslie Cheung is always interesting to watch -- and when
the payoff moment comes, he pulls the switch-hitting off
brilliantly.
Though the ideology of the film may be questionable,
it does reflect the flawed marital values of Hong Kong
(and Asia); and it may be unfair to demand that the film
provide solutions to the social problems it
exposes. There is no question that the film is
incredibly inventive and tries just about anything to
keep its audience guessing what will come next -- not
just in the way of cheap gags and wicked one-liners, but
with unexpected cuts, camera angles and visual
matches. The gamesmanship between Chiao and Cheung
illustrates the anything-goes approach -- their
play-acting of Pretty Woman and Ghost at
once pays tribute to, parodies and surpasses the
entertainment value of Hollywood films. And
although the film essentially has a Hollywood heart it
is aware of Hollywood's incompatibility with Chinese
values: when the mistress becomes the wife, she joyfully
sings "Pretty Woman" while Leslie Cheung, and
the rest of us, regard her scornfully.
The scenes with Chiao and Cheung are clearly the
brightest spots in the movie. Chiao, with his
rubbery expressions and sudden jerky movements, has
natural physical comic gifts, but more important is the
persona he exemplifies, one that is emblematic of 90s
Hong Kong hipness. His displacement of heartfelt
sentiment towards absurd objects (i.e. his passionate
love song to his catheter bottle) mocks the treacly
expressions that have soaked Hong Kong melodramas for
decades. His sudden outbursts of anger, pain and
insanity are cathartic exclamations that seem endemic of
the postmodern mania in the East Asian mind.
Maggie Cheung similarly has a sense of craziness in
both her constant evocation of Hollywood starlets, and
in her dire devotion to Chiao. Somehow she manages
to make it all seem well-adjusted and cool; even in this
supporting role her star power is undeniable. What
is it about that shrewd moon of a face, that
enthusiastic smile, that manages to defeat any obstacle,
any improbability in the plot? What is it about
her indomitable spirit that lets her get away with
wearing Madonna's cone-breasted bodice or Julia Roberts'
hooker outfit -- garments that already looked ridiculous
on their original wearers?
This film is a happy accident -- the makers probably
never intended to make more than a sex comedy of mild
entertainment value, but the talent of the people
involved created something relentlessly clever as well
as crass, also made more social insights than they could
have expected to discover.
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