My Young Auntie Review
While the newer titles hitting shelves via the Dragon Dynasty label seem to be grabbing most of the label's glory every bit as significant is the company's treatment of older classics, among them the Lau Kar Leung directed, Kara Hui starring classic My Young Auntie. Still best known as the director of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin Lau is a far more prolific and diverse talent than many realize with a good number of comedies on his resume, My Young Auntie prime among them. An energetic, anachronistic, wildly inventive, everything including the kitchen sink action comedy that stands the test of time remarkably well and is given a handsome DVD release here.
Kara Hui won the Best Actress award at the 1981 Hong Kong Film Awards for this, her first major starring role. Hui is Jing Dai-Nan, a young woman who agrees to a marriage of convenience with an elderly benefactor. See, it seems that the old man doesn't have a legal heir of his own and custom says that if he dies single and heirless his possessions must pass to his next oldest brother, a cruel and unjust man who deserves to inherit nothing. And so, sensing the end is near, he asks Jing to help him cut his brother out of the deal entirely. If Jing marries the old man, then she becomes heir and will be free to pass the inheritance on to its intended recipient, the man's nephew by his deceased older brother.
Sure enough, the elderly patriarch passes soon enough and Jing travels to meet her new relatives, relatives who she now outranks in the family hierarchy by virtue of her marriage. Cue up the comedy of errors and conflicted social values. Yu Jing-Chuen, the intended nephew -- played by Lau Kar Leung himself -- is significantly older than Jing and yet must defer to her wishes. His son, Ah Tao, is more Jing's age but having been sent to Hong Kong to study is entirely enamored with Western practices and re-christened himself Charlie, constantly babbling away in an odd pastiche of languages and spouting nonsense about western custom and trends.
Lau wastes no time in establishing the tone of the film here. He plays for broad slapstick playing up the gender and cultural conflicts between Jing and Ah Tao, a young couple that clearly are attracted to one another and completely clueless about that fact. Ah Tao and Jing butt heads immediately when the youngster mistakes his new aunt for a home invader and that conflict continues and escalates over matters of discipline, the clash between tradition and change and constant competition over whose kung fu is better. And the personalities couldn't be any more different, Ah Tao's high energy silliness standing in sharp contrast to Jing's quietly luminous sincerity.
The friendly competition and general silliness of the film's opening stages gradually escalates until it reaches absurd proportions, this stage finally peaking with a musical number and Ah Tao trying to embarrass his aunt by inviting her to a western style masquerade ball -- a ball that involves Shaw Brothers icon Gordon Liu fencing in a ridiculous curly blonde wig -- before things become somewhat more serious. The bad uncle uses the ball as a set up, having both Ah Tao and Jing falsely arrested so that Yu will hav eto bail them out, thus leaving the estate empty so that his men can steal the deeds for the disputed property. Cue the epic -- though still comedic -- martial arts battle.
No doubt about it, as fun as it is to see Lau Kar Leung in a rare lead role and Gordon Liu subjected to a succession of silly wigs, what makes My Young Auntie work is the auntie herself, Kara Hui. Not only is she beautiful and graceful but she shows a remarkable range, able to shift from goofy slapstick to grace and sincerity in a heartbeat. She plays the innocent, naive country girl lost in the city just as convincingly as she does teh determined fighter for justice. This is a role that demands much of Hui and she meets the challenges incredibly well, a remarkable feat considering she was learning martial arts on set in between takes and was only a teenage girl at the time.
The new DVD release is excellent. The film comes with a flawless anamorphic widescreen transfer and the option of the original Mandarin soundtrack -- the default selection -- or the original English dub, both presented in the original mono. A surprising omission is the lack of a Cantonese audio track considering that some of the performers did their parts in that language. This was a mixed language film, though, and screened only in purely Cantonese, Mandarin or English versions so no matter what option you were to go with at least some actors were going to be dubbed, but it's odd to not have the option of at least being able to choose the Cantonese if you so desire. Subtitles come in English and Spanish varieties, the English very well translated, marred only by a very small number of spelling errors. On the feature front you get a short interview with Kara Hui, interviews with scholars David Chute and Andy Klein, a collection of trailers including a number of original Shaw Brothers trailers, a stills gallery, and a feature commentary by scholars Andy Klein and Elvis Mitchell. I've never been a great fan of commentaries done by people not connected with the film and that remains the case here but this is entertaining, if nothing else, and the rest of the features are solid, if somewhat limited. Features or no, this one is all about the film and this is a good one, very well presented. Very highly recommended.
