Soul
Reviewed by YTSL
This 1986 Hsu Feng and John Shum co-production
opens with a woman (Deannie Yip’s main character is variously known as
Mrs. Lee, Yip Cheung and Girl Girl) and a man (David Chiang plays Detective
Inspector Lee Kai Yeung) having sex in between waking up and having breakfasts.
Before the film had reached its ten minute mark, he is seen falling to
his death from a high place in his home police station. In the ten
minutes that follows, she: Witnesses the death of a Taiwanese woman
(who she had been previously chatting with about good hairdressers and
schools); belatedly finds out that the Mandarin speaking female was her
spouse’s mistress; also learns -- from a grim-faced colleague of his --
about her late husband being suspected of corruption; gets asked to take
care of “the other woman”’s now orphaned three and half year old son; goes
home to find out that the Filipino maid has absconded with her boyfriend
(and trashed the place before doing so); plus has to deal with the electricity
supply to her living space suddenly getting cut (due to the Filipino maid
not having paid the bill, despite her employer having thrice directed her
to do so).
If nothing else, the first quarter of this work
looked to be director Shu Kei’s very accurate capturing on celluloid of
a(n upper-)middle Hong Kong married woman’s nightmare! Something
else that I reckon that he effectively accomplishes in the early section
is the providing of viewers with an accurate taste of the surprising and
eventful nature of an offering which nonetheless is actually neither very
fast paced nor in possession of a storyline that’s at all hard to follow.
When it is taken as a whole, I do believe that the movie’s scriptwriter
as well as helmer was definitely successful in his bid to make a multi-genre
offering that turned out to be about equal parts thriller, melodrama, comedy
and women’s film plus was “structured...so people could not tell what would
happen next” (This and subsequent quotes were culled from the SOUL portion
of the Shu Kei interview in Miles Wood’s 1998 “Cine East: Hong Kong Cinema
Through the Looking Glass”).
Perhaps those who have viewed John Cassavete’s
“Gloria” will be more able to predict the path that this film -- which
Shu Kei stated he had been very much inspired by -- follows. Since
I have not done so, I can’t say whether it actually does. However,
I find it hard to believe that there actually exists another movie in which
one individual is killed by being hit on the head by a sausage and another
dies in part because of a champagne bucket’s worth of ice getting thrown
on him (And yes, I do actually think as well as sincerely hope that these
events -- along with a few others plus certain rich little details -- speak
to SOUL’s having a black comedic vein running through much of it)!
It also seems to be beyond doubt that Deannie
Yip is as much the heart as well as central figure of SOUL as Gena Rowlands
was in the 1980 Hollywood production. Shu Kei is on the record too
as saying that -- in a manner not unlike with “Hu-Du-Men” and Josephine
Siao -- the major impetus for his deciding to make this offering was because
he had great admiration for this veteran actress and wanted to work with
her. Although she is not the female who comes off as the most striking
and glamorous looking of all who appear in this Christopher Doyle lensed
work (this honor falls instead to Elaine Kam, who plays Girl Girl’s friend,
Gi Gi), Ms. Yip’s certainly is the film’s most interesting and complex
as well as primary character.
The individual who probably gets the second largest
amount of attention in SOUL is Loong Loong -- the little kid who I initially
wished that Girl Girl would either lose or abandon but did come to appreciate
the further along into the film that I went. And while he initially
appeared to be but a lackey to Dennis Chan’s serious-looking but bumbling-acting
Wai Wai, Jacky Cheung (the name of a character as well as the actor who
played him) did turn out to have some depth and a nice side. However,
I expected far greater things of Boy Boy -- the saxophonist seen as Girl
Girl’s soul-mate -- and not just because he came in the form of the great
Taiwanese director, Hou Hsiao Hsien (Yes, really, re the director of such
as “Dust in the Wind”, “A City of Sadness”, “The Puppetmaster” and “Flowers
of Shanghai” making an appearance in a Hong Kong movie). Instead,
his part in the production seemed but an extended version of Manfred Wong
and Alfred Cheung’s cameo roles (as an insurance agent and ticket booth
attendant, respectively).
Much as I appreciate what Shu Kei tried to do
with SOUL (i.e., react against overly formulaic filmmaking), I can see
why the film flopped at the local box office. Especially when compared
with “Peking Opera Blues”, “100 Ways to Murder Your Wife” and “Passion”
(three other works released in 1986 that are creative in their own ways
plus were bigger commercial and/or critical hits), it could have been more
tightly edited and not so loosely structured. There also is a restrained
feel to the production that makes it so that its viewers are likely to
chuckle rather than laugh at some of its proceedings and wryly or wanly
smile rather than feel truly saddened about certain other occurrences that
take place over the course of it. Still, my sense is that upon viewing
this early cinematic offering of his, some more people will add themselves
to the list of Hong Kong film fans who wish that the individual who I’ve
actually seen manning the cash register of his book cum video store would
spend more time and effort making -- rather than reviewing and selling
home video copies of -- movies.
My rating for this film: 7.