TRUE WOMEN FOR SALE Review and Trailer
We have a good deal of affection for Hong Kong director Herman Yau around these parts; check the "related links" below to see the views of five different Twitch writers. He first came to attention for his sensational early 90s Category III flicks Ebola Syndrome and The Untold Story, but his range and abilities have broadened and deepened over the years. He has a particular talent with low budget social dramas, the kind that don't tend to be in favor with major international film festivals, which prefer to dote on "name" arthouse directors or younger filmmakers from other Asian lands whose reputation the fests hope to "make" with their selection.
No matter. Yau keeps working, and 2008's True Women for Sale is the latest example of his sterling abilities. The film just had its European Premiere at the Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy, which concluded today. The original Chinese title (Sing kung chok tse yee: Ngor but mai sun, ngor mai chi gung) translates as "I don't sell my body, I sell my uterus," which gives a very succinct idea of the basic scenario, set in post-Handover Hong Kong in 2000.
Chung, played by Prudence Liew, who won a Golden Horse Award as Best Actress for her performance, is an aging, drug-addicted prostitute with rotten teeth who raises chickens on her balcony. Right next door lives Mainland Chinese immigrant Wong Lin Fa (Race Wong), pregnant with an infant daughter and recently widowed. Both women have 'sold their uterus' to men at the price of their dignity.
Chung sends money to a mystery person and is trying to earn enough to get her teeth fixed in order to impress the same mystery person. Lin Fa desperately wants residency and married her much older husband to do it; with his untimely death she is trying to hang on until the birth of her twins, so she can gain the "right of abode" in Hong Kong. Circling around them like friendly vultures are straight arrow insurance salesman Lau Fu Yi (Anthony Wong) and earnest young photographer Chi (Sammy Leung), who wants to document the lives of the less fortunate.
Both Prudence Liew and Race Wong were understandably nominated for Hong Kong Film Awards. They provide a good contrast. Chung is keenly and sadly aware of her current place in life; even when she's able to muster a smile, she has to cover her mouth out of embarrassment over her teeth. Wong Lin Fa is loud and pushy, but it's hard to blame her for her unpleasant attitude or frequent outbursts of anger; she feels like she paid her dues by her voluntary, unloving servitude to a man who didn't keep his promises. Even if you don't feel sympathy for the characters, though, it's hard not to feel a fair degree of empathy for their situations. In further contrast, Anthony Wong brings a lightness of touch to his insurance salesman, especially when he crushes on a tall, luscious doctor visiting from the Mainland. He's a salesman through and through, but he has fellow feeling for his compatriots. Through his fumbling attempts to woo the disinterested doctor, he reveals his own area of vulnerability.
A similar lightness of touch is exhibited by Yau; he doesn't push too hard in a making a case for the women, yet manages to weave in concerns about the issue of "right of abode" in Hong Kong and the simmering mistrust between residents and immigrants, as well as humorous observations on modern life, mostly courtesy of the insurance salesman. Meeting the young photographer for the first time, for example, he makes a salesman's initial calculation that the kid might be a good candidate for a policy, then quickly revises it downward once he hears the young man's idealistic desire to put his art above his income.
Yau presents the tale as a compelling slice of life that is not always pleasant to contemplate. In all its modesty, True Women for Sale is deceptively effective in dramatizing two downtrodden women who are determined not to stay that way.
