SDAFF Report: ISABELLA Review

Reporting from the San Diego Asian Film Festival, which concludes tonight, Wells Dunbar offers his take on a film much beloved around these parts. Take it away, Wells!

With its outré subject matter, it's mildly surprising Pang Ho-cheung's Isabella graced the opening night of the San Diego Asian Film Festival. But underneath Isabella's central taboo-exploding conceit is a fully realized, beautifully executed film, blending humor, squeamishness and pathos in equal degrees.

Set in 1999 as the Republic of Macau transitions from Portuguese to Chinese rule, Isabella initially follows a loutish cop, Shing (a hangdog-faced Chapman To), as he pleasurelessly cycles through a series of drinking bouts and sexual conquests. After she accosts him post-coitus, he discovers his latest score, young Yan (beautiful pop star Isabella Leong), is his illegitimate daughter. After his initial disgust, an uneasy alliance forms between the two, as Shing, compelled to care for Yan, must come to terms with his indifferently cruel carousing.

Ultimately, over shared meals and drunken nights, something approximating paternal love and acceptance develops between the two (even if that love, especially for Yan, rests uneasily between the erotic and the familial).

Despite delivering an unexpected emotional wallop, it's gorgeous to look at; the camerawork, said to be aided by Christopher Doyle, shares the cinematographer's decentered, through-the-looking-glass sensibility. And like Wong Kar-wai's neon-lit visions of urban squalor, Macau itself is a teeming riot of rust and dilapidation, gorgeous in its ruin, while the comedic slurping, burping and all-around poor table manners of the cast seem to reflect Ho-cheung's disgust with modern mores.

A parallel plot involving anti-corruption forces closing in on Shing dovetails nicely with the themes of family and fidelity, but it's ultimately questions of identity that pervade Isabella, and make it so satisfying. Like the lighthouse lens the two gaze through on a family outing that turns everything upside-down, Isabella captures the feelings of disorientation pervasive within its characters and Macau itself, as it transitions from one colonial identity to another.