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In a flashback, when combed Foon is to be pawned off by her father to an arranged husband, her masculinized, cross-dressed comb sisters are unable to protect her, rather unlike Miss Sheng’s overprotective scissor brigade in Flowers. But generous Wan, the eighth wife of the owner of the silk factory where Foon works, reimburses the husband his dowry and frees Foon, lest she become like Hui-hua in Twin Bracelets. Alienated by the other seven, jealous wives, Westernized Wan, herself a former prostitute, quickly develops a lesbian attachment to Foon, assuming that she, as a homosocial comb sister, would logically be open to such advances. While Foon cuts Wan’s hair — an ironic version of combing — Wan ceremonially offers earrings to Foon, similar to the exchanging of fetishistic jewelry in Twin Bracelets. But unlike Women Flowers, the exchanging of bonds in Intimates occurs outside the traditional space of an actual comb sisterhood, as if the film were attempting to relocate premodern feminist bonding within the individualized spaces of modernity.
Intimates
At a dragonboat festival, still-combed Foon catches the eye of a handsome fisherman and, precisely as in Women Flowers’ dragonboat scene, the camera adopts a female gaze as Foon’s eye-line match peeks at his bare-chested athleticism. The two rendezvous on a romantic bridge while a jealous Wan looks up from a passing boat below. Foon, shamed by Wan’s gaze, is reminded of her combed virginity — which the film implicitly conflates with female love — and breaks her date with the fisherman. In a thematically subtle (or simply ambiguous) scene, Foon accompanies Wan to the house of a wealthy warlord, where impoverished Foon enviously watches Wan and her silk merchant husband waltz in Western dress to European classical music. When the men have left the room, Wan playfully encourages Foon to dance with her, Wan adopting the male role in the dance and Foon the female. Yet each only adopts these roles after the other partner has defined them: intuitively finishing each other’s sentences, Wan says, "I’ll be the…" and Foon finishes her sentence with "man," while Wan finished Foon’s complementary sentence with the word "woman." While it is possible to over-interpret this exchange, it is nevertheless true that only in the Western dance scene is gender role-playing complicit, loving, and voluntary, unlike the seemingly tender but in fact asexual nativist masculinism of Foon’s comb sisters.19 Later, a flashback scene in which Foon massages wounds Wan suffered during abusive heterosexual intercourse is intercut with a contemporary scene of an older Foon rubbing Wai’s back after the latter has overindulged in drink. So while wealthy Wan attempted to coax a lesbian romance from poor Foon by extrapolating a Western-framed lesbianism from her comb sister homosociality, a now empowered Foon transfers this extrapolation in the present day — through film cuts — to a poor Wai as unemancipated from her callous boyfriend as Foon was from the sexual futility of the comb sisters. In a simpler sense, because the flashback structure codes the past as Chinese and the present as Western, and because what Westernized and very heterosexual Wai needs is a good dose of non-lesbian feminism, temporal cum social progress is orchestrated in Western terms that effectively dismiss the idea of combed sisterhoods, even as their homosociality allegedly inspires the film’s modern feminism.
Foon, less lesbian than Wan presumes her to be, finally sleeps with the fisherman in a taboo, impregnating night of passion. Wan, meanwhile, leaves her cruelly capitalist husband, and, finally prepared to act upon her lesbian desires, Wan passionately kisses Foon in a rare burst of honest emotion. But after the kiss, Foon responds, "We’re women…it’s impossible," a statement intending to explain to Wan the difference between combed homosociality and outright homosexuality. But just as Foon rejects Wan, so does the fisherman reject Foon, as the plot seems intent on bringing the two women together despite Foon’s protests. And just as the temporal cross-cutting between the previous back-rubbing scenes subsumed Wan’s premodern same-sex desire within Foon’s modern-day lesbian feminism, so is the blood that empties into the water of Foon’s dramatically lit bathtub abortion scene used as a visual cue to cut to the blood of the present-day suicide attempt of unemancipated Wai, who still cannot live without her callous boyfriend. Once again, the flashback structure inevitably frames its premodern impulses in modern feminist terms. This reframing is even expressed by the difference between the film’s English and Chinese titles: while the original Chinese title Self-Combed (Chi Soh) simply expresses the film’s premodern subject matter, the English Intimates obviously positions this subject matter within the Westernized gay-rights politics advocated by many middlebrow HK films of the mid-1990s.
After Wan rescues Foon from her gruesome abortion, she reveals the depths of her devotion: finally, Foon’s defenses break down and the two women, now financially destitute, make love. But Wan’s silk merchant husband returns, imploring her to accompany him by steamship to the U.S. to escape the invading Japanese, as news of the Nanking Massacre spreads. In the sentimental finale, Wan leaps from the boat, opting to take her lesbian chances with Foon.20 We then make our final return to the present, where an elderly Foon nervously awaits to reunite with long-lost Wan, due to arrive on a boat capsized at sea. But in a genuinely surprising, bizarre twist, young Wai learns that the woman she — and we — thought had been Foon is actually Wan! "I started asking for Foon so often, people started to call me ‘Foon’," Wan says, thus totally reversing the identifications we had made all along, complicating to an impossible degree our attempt to extricate the film’s premodern homosociality from its "bi-curious" modern feminism.
Intimates
In the climactic reunion scene, however, we are not allowed to see (the real) Foon’s elderly face: when the camera glances down, we instead magically, nostalgically see Foon as the young woman we know from the flashbacks, and Wan is transformed likewise. While previously the film merely framed comb sister themes within the modern flashback format, it now reinscribes those premodern identities into that modernity, as if the women’s lesbian reunion were now being declared openly and honestly in modern, democratic, "out" Hong Kong. In effect, director Cheung performs a kind of ideological cosmetic surgery on Foon and Wan: we see the present-tense framing of premodern China in terms of the democratic present. On another level, because young Wai has shown no lesbian tendencies, the film offers solidarity in gender, and not in sexuality, as Foon and Wan’s Chinese lesbianism simply becomes transnational shorthand for overarching modern feminism. Because Wai’s revelation about Foon’s true identity is also the viewer’s, Wai is our moral center, our subject position, and her object lesson is therefore intended to be ours. Thus, Foon and Wan’s lesbian odyssey only amounts to a narrative intended to raise the heterosexual feminist consciousness of Wai, the film’s subjective center. More simply, if the film did not intend to bury its lesbianism in modern heterosexual feminism, it would not bother with its flashback structure in the first place.
We have put to the test Women Flowers, Twin Bracelets, and Intimates to see if they offer real alternatives to Zhang Yimou-ism, as examples of moderately prestigious yet barely exported films that perpetuate rural romanticisms while offering a Chinese feminism removed from the standards of both heteronormative and transnational gazes. But, even though presenting a non-Westernized concern for female bodily autonomy and individual desire — and thus at first glance seeming to offer such alternatives — these films demonstrate that the failure of many generically rural films to adequately address women’s issues is not reducible to the transnational and/or orientalist gazes that Zhang Yimou-ism fosters. Women Flowers is clearly homophobic, as it confusedly tries to navigate between a nostalgia for the premodern past and a refusal of that past’s homosociality; Twin Bracelets, though directed by a woman, continues in the regressive "male" aesthetic of compulsory female suffering and suicide; and while we may be tempted to champion Intimates’ tender depiction of lesbian desire, by rewriting its premodern subject matter in terms of modern feminism, the film actually makes its "Chinese" lesbianism merely a footnote to the contemporary Westernized feminism in which the narrative is framed. So now that we have seen that the clichés and political shortcomings of rural "women’s films" exist with or without the transnational gaze, and with or without the direction of male filmmakers, we should now test a brief set of urban Chinese feminist films, by both male and female filmmakers, whose feminisms turn on the universal criterion of class and not on the particular criterion of nationality or nativism.
PART 3
Feminism Empowered From the Margins: The Category 3 Paradox
While spectacles of rural female suffering have been the primary window through which the West has been permitted to see Chinese "women’s films," some female-directed Hong Kong films21 have also engaged middle-class American feminism.22 Ann Hui’s Starry Is the Night (1988) and the omnibus The New Age of Living Together (1994), co-directed by Sylvia Chang, are both empowering younger-man/older-woman romances; Clara Law’s anti-Mao Reincarnation of Golden Lotus (1989) links female subjugation to the failures of the Cultural Revolution as it feministically rewrites the literally ghostly Chinese past; and Sylvia Chang’s Mary from Beijing (1992) critiques the sexual commodification of women common among China’s wealthy businessmen.23 But although directors such as Sylvia Chang and Ann Hui have taken consistently feminist positions, theirs is largely middle-class feminism, and not the class- and race-conscious "womanism" that Western academies fostered as a panacea for feminism’s bourgeois bias.24
Perhaps the closest Chinese equivalent to the second-wave American feminism exemplified by Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) or Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman (1978) is the Taiwanese The Game They Called Sex (1988), a tripartite film produced by famed actress Hsu Fen, co-directed by the female Taiwanese directors Sylvia Chang, Wang Shau-di, and Jing Kuao-jao, and starring a naïve Maggie Cheung as the oppressed heroine whose consciousness must be raised. In the film’s first episode, Cheung is the depressed teenage victim of an arranged marriage; in the second, we see her years later unhappily wedded to a man obsessed with masturbatory video games instead of her pleasure; in the third, we see her searching for meaning after her divorce with or without a man. In the first two episodes, Cheung supplements her oppression with fantasies about being raped by impossibly handsome criminals, while in the final episode she has presumably been cured of these "criminal" rape-and-rescue romance fantasies by dint of her salubrious, liberating divorce. But in addition to a narrative that (for some reason) turns Cheung’s sexual desires into neurotic rape fantasies, the film’s crude sexual symbolism — a storefront crowded with ticking (biological) clocks, a curious Cheung gawking at a phallic knife in close-up — sabotages whatever goals of liberation the film may have had.25 In the end, after deciding against a relationship with a "good" man, Cheung settles on being an elementary school teacher, thus sociologically creating children without biologically producing them. The unfortunate product of this "sociological" liberation is that Cheung must ultimately choose between monogamy and asexuality, with no opportunity to enjoy the promiscuous and fleetingly human pleasures enjoyed by the male. This closed either/or binary ironically reinforces the bourgeois sexual stasis that is the problem to begin with, as an asexuality coded as modern independence (a la Mulan) substitutes for what would be suicide or self-deprivation in the premodern marriage resistance films.
The Mistress
Because most of HK’s urban feministic films do not only usually deal with bourgeois characters, but are films by (female) directors who enjoy an elitist auteur status, one must consider The Mistress (1999), whose director, American-born Crystal Kwok, did not begin as a "serious artist" as did Ann Hui or Clara Law, but worked her way up from being a beauty pageant winner and supporting actress known mainly for her physical charms26 — precisely the sexism from which The Mistress’s heroines suffer. What makes The Mistress more notable is its "category 3" rating, a censorship marker that generally indicates either sex-and-violence exploitation27 or, more rarely, a film of politically sensitive subject matter.28 Kwok herself has expressed some surprise at the censorship certificate she garnered. "It was classified category 3. However, there is no nudity… It explores female sexuality from a psychological point of view. It is a subject that is taboo in HK."29 Kwok continues, "If I had known they were going to give me a category 3…maybe I would have been tempted to make the film genuinely outrageous."30 Five years in the making and obviously a labor of love, The Mistress attempts to redress the bourgeois bias of much of HK’s cinematic feminism by satirizing the classism, runaway capitalism, and sexual commodification often glamorized in HK cinema.
The Mistress
In the credit sequence, we see heroine Alex’s dreams: a fantastic vision of sylvan fairies having costumed sex in a Rousseauian forest, it is an image of (sexual) Nature as pure, uncorrupted, and sentimental, as contrasted to modern HK’s exploitation, capitalism, and sexual heartlessness. The film proper opens with a sequence in the streets of HK, showing cosmopolitan citizens confronted by ads for Calvin Klein, Christian Dior, and other signs of classist consumption, images that are themselves a manufactured fantasy whose price tags reduce society to status games. UC Berkeley graduate Alex is one such citizen, tutoring tycoon Henry’s mistress Michelle in English — the international language of capital — while Michelle tutors Alex in the universal language of mistress-ism. Though Michelle — formerly an impoverished Mainlander before taking up sexual capitalism — is primarily concerned with learning the English names of prestigious name-brand clothing, her materialism is revealed as harboring no notions of irony when she fails to understand that the name of Alex’s favorite nail polish is "Urban Decay."
Michelle draws Alex further into her world, first at a garish S/M party, and later when they and two other prostitutes humiliate a masochistic fat client by kicking him under a mahjong table while they gamble. "The more money they have, the more perverse they get," says Michelle, as the mahjong table comes to symbolize an HK economy seemingly controlled by common citizens (they play the game) but which is in fact in the hands of giggling, well-fed men behind — or in this case under — the scene. Alex’s sexual imagination stirred, she "plays hooker" with her cash-strapped boyfriend Eric, demanding without much humor money from him for sex and becoming angry when he, thinking it only a game, demands his money back afterwards. Alex, lured by Michelle’s glamour, becomes disenchanted with Eric, an economic loser who doesn’t understand the "true exchange value" of money. When Henry saves Alex from being run over by a car, he further comes to symbolize security for her, while she, complementarily, becomes another one of Henry’s "securities" and subsequently his second mistress.31 As a temporarily content Alex stands in Henry’s boardroom, surveying at eye level the phallic skyscrapers that surround her beyond the corporate windows, she has broken through the glass ceiling using the only "weapon" she has: bodily materialism.32 But while in premodern Women Flowers and Twin Bracelets ascendant female desire was cued through eye-line matches directed at male sex objects, here the ascendancy of female material power becomes pessimistically equated with the negation of Alex’s sexual desires, for the objects of her skyline gaze are not flesh and blood but entirely sterile phalluses of modernist glass and steel.
The Mistress
While The Mistress purports to examine female desire from a female perspective — or at least from a "psychological" perspective — it seems to me that because most of Alex’s fantasies are masochistic and/or posit a male spectator, it is really a female internalization of male desire that is being examined. Initially, prompted by bizarre stories of sexual deviance she overhears, a sexually frustrated Alex has gloriously colorful fantasies in which businessman dine on sashimi served upon naked women, in which she herself becomes a living sex doll, in which she joins Henry and Michelle in their "French maid" sex games, in which she gropes Michelle’s new brassiere as she affixes it to her bosom, and in which Henry strikes golden golf balls into her vagina on a putting green. All these scenarios posit a male spectator, including the lesbian scenario with Michelle in the fitting room (a stereotypical male fantasy which implies a male spectator) and female objectification (quite literally in the sex doll fantasy!), mentalities she must adopt and internalize upon her entrée into a masculine capitalism where the mistress becomes just another replaceable commodity whose built-in obsolescence is hardly different from that of a car or microwave.
In the film’s most telling sequence, Michelle joins Henry at a grand dinner party at which are gathered his business colleagues attended by all their mistresses. When Henry excuses himself from the table, Michelle does an expert impersonation of Henry, imitating his business rhetoric, chomping a cigar, collecting business cards, and finally making a toast. "To Hong Kong! To the economy! To our country!" she says, with the added optimism of "our country" no longer meaning Hong Kong per se after 1997. Yet, as we see, savvy Michelle does not labor under a false consciousness — indeed, she consciously knows all too well how to be complicit in the fatedness of her dependency; and the joke of her parody, rather than being subversive, is only an acknowledgement of the fact that she is indeed not a powerful man. In the second half of the film, the tycoon dinner-party scene is replayed, with the camera circling the scene in identically voyeuristic fashion, but now Alex attempts to duplicate Michelle’s parody of Henry’s machismo. Yet Anglicized Alex is unable to confidently smoke the Freudian cigar that Michelle puffed so professionally in her scene — she will come to be an incompetent mistress because she, unlike Michelle, doesn’t know how to be passive.
Alex complains to Henry, who now has little time for her, that she is not like Michelle — she is not a country bumpkin but a sophisticated urbanite. In two senses, she is indeed not like Michelle: as a Westernized Chinese, she is too individualistic to be happy as a mistress, yet as someone who has not known the economic hardships of Mainlander Michelle, neither can she be motivated to be successful as a mistress. Driven to madness, she destroys her mistress-gotten apartment and languishes in the gutters of HK, where she reimagines the sylvan dream of the credits sequence, this time envisioning the dream’s climax in the fantasy image of an ecstatically cleansing waterfall. But an ironic, equally fantastic coda image redresses this cathartic, unrealistic fantasy. We now see Alex and Michelle objectified on a stage, dressed as chorus girls, singing a sarcastically cheerful anthem to female passivity. In the end, the lessons of their odyssey will have little influence on the sociological condition of women at large, and the only product of their travails is a sense of irony as politically impotent as one of Zhang Yimou’s oriental "parodies." So despite its pointed critique, even this most cutting-edge Chinese film unfortunately recapitulates an admittedly darker version of the aesthetic of compulsory female martyrdom.
A Fake Pretty Woman
In truth, people tend to judge films the same way they judge each other: by physical appearances. All of the films we have discussed so far are, if not "A-level" productions, at least "B+" productions aimed at audiences with preconceived notions of bourgeois cinematic respectability. Even The Mistress, perhaps to counteract potential criticisms of sexploitation, encodes its capitalist critique in the artiest, fanciest visual terms possible, thus unintentionally succumbing to a kind of capitalism in form, if not in content.33 So if we are still concerned with the orientalist agenda possibly underlying the transnational commerce that decides which films do and do not receive Western distribution, we should logically turn our attentions to feminist films of such low budgets that they, though perhaps informed by Western feminism, have neither an interest in nor possibility of reaching a sizeable Western audience.
Just as Carol Clover (1992) has shown how allegedly exploitive rape-revenge potboilers can in fact be more feministic than their mainstream Hollywood counterparts34, low-budget category 3 films, because they don’t demand to be taken seriously, can provide disempowered audiences and embattled film directors alike with a safe space to nakedly enact political agendas that would in mainstream films be sanitized, coded with labored metaphors, shrouded in subtext, or disallowed entirely. I am, however, leery of suggesting that low budgets necessarily give rise to a more "authentic" feminism; on the contrary, too often we have been duped into thinking that a film’s impoverished budget is in itself a pious stamp of democratic authenticity — a sort of Mother Theresa ideology of filmmaking — regardless of the film’s thematic or political content. While there is something to be said for the desperate fury of an I Spit on Your Grave (1978), there is also an eagerness to overestimate the feminism of the low-budget rape-revenge genre, which replaces the overdetermined meekness and suffering of the New Testament with the equally overdetermined vengeance of the Old. The rape genre’s castration fixation, certainly borne of the genre’s primarily male directors and audiences, ignores the fact that castration, though seemingly a materialist, literalist act, only symbolically neuters patriarchy without actually remaking it — it is a futile gesture of destruction, not a progressive act of transformation.
A Fake Pretty Woman
While not all category 3 films mean to be politicized, and precious few of them are politically enlightened, it is nevertheless clear that the category 3 rating’s censorial conflation of sex and politics has fostered a generic preoccupation with the issue of women’s bodily autonomy in a male world.35 Therefore, we next consider a more typically ugly category 3 film, Ivan Lai’s A Fake Pretty Woman (1995).36 Thankfully, this is not a "good film" — on the contrary, because it is entirely unconcerned with the elitist economics of visually attractive art, it can declaim its feminist subject matter straightforwardly, without veiling it behind a bourgeois veneer of style. It is all the more remarkable for being an exploitation film that is not conventionally violent37, and that vociferously espouses an anticapitalist agenda in lieu of the reductive castration anxiety symbolism that usually poses as "feminism" in the exploitation film.
Though more of a medical ethics melodrama than the rape thriller usually signified by the category 3 rating, A Fake Pretty Woman’s themes of bodily violation and autonomy are similar to those of the rape film, an ideologically overarching genre that actually encompasses everything from the horror films Clover examines to Joan Chen’s Xiu Xiu. Heroine "May" has been conditioned by a breast-obsessed HK to believe she is ugly ("I have small eyes, flat tits, and a scar"), and undergoes plastic surgery at the hands of female Dr. Wong. She marvels at her new body in the mirror ("Am I dreaming?") and pursues a career as an actress — precisely the type of fluffy fashion model most other category 3 films promote as sexual icons. Her surgeries (represented by real surgery footage) enable her to become a successful actress and the fiancé of a billionaire’s son — yet a feministic deus ex machina mandates that a wayward truck demolish her wedding procession, leaving her hideously scarred by poetic justice. Upon learning from surgeons and scandal sheets that May is a "Fake pretty woman!" the wealthy groom-to-be abandons her, hypocritically disgusted by her bodily capitalism. Unlike the myopic postfeminism of Garry Marshall’s Pretty Woman (1990), in A Fake Pretty Woman the mobilization of a woman’s bodily power is not to her advantage, for in a world of few options whoring (or self-commodification) is not an active choice but a built-in precondition. After some moralizing by the plot, May undergoes a second, restorative surgery and returns to a normal life with her former saintly boyfriend Tak, whom she had previously abandoned on the grounds that he was insufficiently capitalistic (just as Alex had abandoned economic loser Eric in The Mistress).
A Fake Pretty Woman
More notable in Fake, though, is the character of Dr. Wong, a female plastic surgeon who must admit to profiteering from women’s self-debasement. As with pimping Miss Sheng of Women Flowers, capitalist women operate as exploitatively as men, as passive-aggressive economics feed into and define gender binarism. Yet Dr. Wong’s own feminist consciousness is piqued when she catches her adulterous husband fooling around with a twenty-something bimbo. Though May is the ostensible heroine, it is the middle-aged Wong’s voice that curiously narrates the film in voice-over ("I feel terrible when I think of the word ‘old’"), and who considers plastic surgery herself after she realizes that even though her doctor’s profession renders her capitalistically "masculine," she is biologically and (hetero-)sexually still a woman in a man’s world. It is only when treating a friend of May’s who was severely burnt, and subsequently witnessing his girlfriend’s devotion in spite of his appearance, that she realizes her marriage and her profession are shams. In the end, we see a divorced Dr. Wong with the two happy couples she has treated, but she walks into the sunset alone — not the transcendental walk through the shadowy alleys of the pleasure quarters that closes Mizoguchi’s protofeminist A Geisha (1953), nor the noble false front of female perseverance that Takamini Hideko wears in Naruse’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), but a defiant march to the upbeat tune of the closing credits. Admittedly, the inclusion of happy couples (monogamy) and the single defiant woman (asexuality) only redistributes to two parties the either/or binaries that underwrite normative (or conservative) sexuality, rather than have them occur alternately within the same woman as an identity crisis, as they do in The Game They Called Sex. Nevertheless, the feminism of A Fake plainly demonstrates the interrelationship between economics and sexuality while avoiding the predictable aesthetic of mandatory martyrdom indulged by both Xiu Xiu and even The Mistress, but will be deemed beneath consideration because its themes operate within a genre that is "low" and content-based (category 3 nudity and gory surgeries) and not "high" and form-based (narrative arc of tragic suffering).
Yet the comparison between Fake and Xiu Xiu is complicated by another wrinkle. Clearly, as a low-budget, primitively filmed exploitation film, the Westernized (though not Western) A Fake is not merely less exportable than the Easternized (though not Eastern) Xiu Xiu, but it is equally disreputable in its native land, opposing not only Western hegemonic film distribution practices but the conservative nativist aesthetics of domestic Chinese art films.38 But more interestingly, because A Fake is unpolished, noncommercial, avowedly feminist, and devoid of the hip action scenes expected of exploitation, it also opposes the current orientalist interest in Asian cult films.39 A simply political film, it is totally absent of the commercial style that invites commodification and appropriation by pseudo-hip Western cult audiences, who claim to be marginalized but often indulge in the covertly and masturbatorily imperialist gaze of the underground.
Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl
Meanwhile, Xiu Xiu is essentially mainstream in Taiwan — it won the Taiwanese equivalent of the Oscar — but its tame, politically correct, liberal-humanist content is rendered through the Western politics of film distribution into something falsely, undeservedly oppositional, simply because any imported film can seem oppositional when weighed against Hollywood xenophobia. In fact, the oppressions of surgical beauty that A Fake Pretty Woman decries are analogous to the oppressions of cinematographic beauty that Xiu Xiu advances: both oppressions are products of First World technology designed to exploit the sensibilities of the gazer for profit. Simply, both plastic surgery and expensive cinematography are in the business of selling an economic definition of beauty to reinforce classist sensibilities of appearance-based value — it is merely a puritanical hypocrisy that disparages the capitalism of plastic surgery as deceptive and praises the capitalism of prettified cinematography as aesthetically genuine.
WORKS CITED
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Film Theory and Criticism. Fourth edition. Eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pages 665-681.
Berry, Chris. "Representing Chinese Women: Researching Women in the Chinese Cinema." Dress, Sex, and Text in Chinese Culture. Ed. Antonia Finnane and Anne McLaren. Clayton, Australia: Monash Asia Institute, 1999.
Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. London: BFI, 1992.
Chow, Rey. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Dai Jinhua. "Rewriting Chinese Women: Gender Production and Cultural Space in the Eighties and Nineties." Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Ed., Mayfair Mei-hui Yang. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Pages 191-206.
Hinsch, Bret. Passions of the Cut Sleeve. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Kaplan, E. Ann. "Problematising Cross-Cultural Analysis: The Case of Women in Recent Chinese Cinema." Perspectives on Chinese Cinema. Ed. Berry, Chris. London: BFI, 1991. Pages 141-154.
Stockard, Janice. Daughters of the Canton Delta. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989.
Topley, Margaret. "Marriage Resistance in Rural Kwantung." Women in Chinese Society. Ed. Wolf, Margery, and Witke, Roxane. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975. Pages 67-88.
Wang Zheng. Women in the Chinese Enlightenment. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui. "From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference: State Feminism, Consumer Sexuality, and Women’s Public Sphere in China." Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Ed. Yang. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Pages 35-67.
Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui. "Introduction." Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Ed. Yang. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Pages 1-34.
Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui. Through Chinese Women’s Eyes. (videorecording). New York: Women Make Movies, 1997.
NOTES
19. The masculinism of Intimates’ comb sisters is represented in a scene in which one sister, sporting a male pigtail, prepares for an arranged marriage similar to what Janice Stockard has identified as a "delayed transfer" marriage, where the groom must wait up to three years before being allowed to cohabit with his bride. Donning intricately threaded undergarments over her masculinized attire to withstand the groom’s anticipated penile assault, she further dances with a castrating scissor to the delight of the other comb sisters.
20. The mawkish, Spielbergian sentimentalism of the last twenty minutes of Intimates severely compromises what until that point had been — as one can tell from this plot synopsis — a complex film. That said, such populism is the standard failing of nearly all films produced by HK’s bourgeois-humanist "U.F.O." production company.
21. Chris Berry reports that the editors of the Asian film magazine Cinemaya found that there were "almost no notable" mainstream female filmmakers in Hong Kong that could be spotlighted for their special issue on women directors in Asia. This seems quite perplexing considering the fame of Ann Hui, Clara Law, Sylvia Chang, and Mabel Cheung. See Berry’s article "Representing Chinese Women: Researching Women in the Chinese Cinema" in Dress, Sex, and Text in Chinese Culture. Ed. Antonia Finnane and Anne McLaren. Clayton, Australia: Monash Asia Institute, 1999. Page 207.
22. Because too few urban feminist (as opposed to merely "female-centered") Mainland films have been exported to the West, I am forced to mainly consider urban Hong Kong films.
23. With respect to male directors, Stanley Kwan’s Mikio Naruse-esque Full Moon in New York (1990) can be added to this list.
24. Admittedly, there are some rare exceptions: Sylvia Chang’s feminist immigrant narrative Siao Yu (1995) and Ann Hui’s Ah Kam (1996), which stars Michelle Yeoh as a working-class stuntwoman, do not center on bourgeois characters. However, I can think of no films from a homogeneous Hong Kong — feminist or otherwise — that deal seriously with race issues beyond East/West binaries.
25. The unsubtlety of the film is surprising because, although Wang Shau-di’s more accomplished Yours and Mine (1997) was still years away, Sylvia Chang had already directed the sophisticated Passion (1986). It is worth noting that at an August 2000 screening of The Game They Called Sex at Manhattan’s Taipei Theater, the almost entirely Taiwanese audience tittered in uncomfortable embarrassment at the film’s clumsy dream sequence and rape fantasies.
26. Kwok’s most notable early roles were as window dressing in Sammo Hung’s Dragons Forever (1988) and Jackie Chan’s Police Story 2 (1988). Later, she apprenticed as assistant director on Sylvia Chang’s Mary from Beijing (1992).
27. Non-narrative porn is also classified "3." Unlike the U.S., which uses NC-17 and X ratings to effectively distinguish between narrative (i.e. high-budget) and non-narrative (i.e. low-budget) forms of pornography, the HK "3" lumps everything together solely on the basis of content, regardless of the quality of production values.
28. Well-known films rated category 3 for political reasons include Jacob Cheung’s class-conscious Cageman (1992) and Wang Tung’s anti-Mao If I Were for Real (1981). Films dealing with the inner workings of the triads — and which often come across as pro-triad propaganda — can also receive 3’s, such as Wong Tai-Loi’s Triads, the Inside Story (1989).
29. From an untitled interview with Crystal Kwok at http://www.ifrance.com/hkcinemagic/ siteanglais/atsuihark/acrystal.htm. Downloaded March 31, 2001.
30. "Interview with Crystal Kwok," at www.mediaasia.com. Downloaded March 31, 2001. Though touted in publicity materials as the first female-directed category 3, the film was preceded by Clara Law’s arty Temptation of a Monk (1993) and Julie Lee’s Trilogy of Lust (1995), discussed below in footnote 38.
31. The character of Henry is played by Ray Liu, an actor best known for playing violent gangster capitalists in Poon Man-kit’s To Be Number One (1991) and Lord of the East China Sea Pts. 1-2 (1993); thus, Liu’s star discourse intertextually turns Henry into yet another gangster.
32. The woman’s deployment of her own bodily materialism is, of course, also a staple of sexploitation genres; ads for Doris Wishman’s Deadly Weapons (1973), for instance, proclaimed that star Chesty Morgan confronted the mafia "using the only two weapons she has!"
33. That The Mistress captured the People’s Choice Award at France’s Deauville Film Festival may be further evidence of its "respectability."
34. I am particularly thinking of Clover’s comparison of Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and Jonathan Kaplan’s The Accused (1988). See Chapter 3 of Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992).
35. For example, Raped by Angel (1993), Passionate Killing in the Dream (1992), Love to Kill (1993), The Wrath of Silence (1994), Red to Kill (1994), Peeping Tom (1997), and countless others all evince an intense (bordering on neurotic) obsession with women’s basic bodily rights, played out in terms of violent, perverse sexploitation of sometimes surprising textual intricacy. Others, such as Brother of Darkness (1994) and the risibly homophobic Sweet Smell of Death (1994), are obsessed with men’s bodily autonomy. However, while lesbianism is commonplace in category 3 (c.f. The Love That Is Wrong [1993]), in my survey of about 200 category 3 films I have found no lesbian-feminist films among them, with the possible exception of (gay director) Clarence Ford’s Naked Killer (1992), whose feminism is still but a castrating caricature. In fact, these films’ feminisms are often balanced by a defensive amount of conservatism and homophobia; for instance, Raped by an Angel sensationalizes the plight of a character with AIDS, while Passionate Killing in the Dream decenters its main lesbian character while pretending to bourgeois ideals of tolerance. Julian Stringer has outlined some of the economic and post-Tiananmen Square political concerns of category 3 in "Sex and Violence in Postmodern Hong Kong," in Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media, ed. Christopher Sharrett (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999).
36. Director Ivan Lai’s rape-revenge horrors Daughter of Darkness (1993) and Daughter of Darkness 2 (1994) are more generic, more commercial category 3 films. In each, the abused heroine must castrate and destroy not a gang of primitive id-males, as in the American rape-revenge film, but a cruelly Confucian family.
37. While containing no action scenes or murders, the film does exploit its plastic surgery sequences, whose documentary operation footage adds a "mondo" quality to the film. On the one hand, these scenes are the film’s exploitive raison d’etre. On the other, they are superfluous to the narrative and come across as "inserts," unlike the rape scenes of the rape-revenge film, which are not merely decorative but intrinsic to the plot.
38. Also compare Xiu Xiu to Julie Lee’s category 3 hardcore porn film Trilogy of Lust (1995), which concerns a Mainland prostitute, ravaged by the Cultural Revolution, who journeys to Hong Kong only to be ravaged by the exploitations of capitalism. Though unfortunately concluding with suicide and martyrdom, the film ambitiously attempts to equate the Cultural Revolution’s "rape" of China with capitalism’s "rape" of the commodified female body, a formulation that, however clumsy, is more astute than Xiu Xiu’s simplistic pro-democracy agenda.
39. Indeed, I have never seen a review of A Fake Pretty Woman anywhere in the glut of gleefully orientalist Asian cult fanzines.
January 2002 | Issue 35
Copyright © 2002 by Andrew Grossman
ACCESS: All of the films mentioned in this essay are available in some format. Twin Bracelets and Intimates are both currently available on Hong Kong import DVD, and Women Flowers is available on videotape from Tai Seng Video. The Game They Called Sex is available on Mei Ah laserdisc; The Mistress is currently available on Hong Kong DVD; A Fake Pretty Woman is available from World Video (Hong Kong) on tape and laserdisc. The laserdisc of The Game, of course, is long out of print, although it is likely that at some point it was also released on Hong Kong video. As always, check ebay for some of this material.
MORE ASIAN CINEMA: Our collected articles on Hong Kong and Japanese cinema
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