Trivial Matters
Director: Pang Ho-cheung
Rating: 7.0
Year: 2007
This wasn't what I was expecting though I don't
know exactly what I was expecting with a film from Hong Kong director Pang
Ho-cheung. Beginning with You Shoot, I Shoot in 2001 he has directed a series
of off-kilter brilliant films that have little in common with one another
other than a vivid imagination at work. You Shoot, I Shoot was an eccentric
comedy about professional killers. Men Suddenly in Black is another comedy
about four married men behaving badly when their wives went out of town.
Beyond Our Ken about female bonding after one of them is dumped during a
hiccup attack. AV is a very clever satire about two guys who decide to make
porno films. Isabella is a lovely drenched in Wong Kar-wai atmospherics about
a father and the daughter he didn't know he had. And that takes me up to
this film. The only one I have seen after this is Dream Home which is a hilarious
exercise in excess when a woman starts killing people in order to get her
Dream Home. They are all terrific and very different from each other but
with a sly sense of humor at work in all of them.
This turns out to be a little of everything - I see bits of You Shoot , Men
Suddenly in Black, Beyond Our Ken and AV residing within. He does that with
seven different short films that range from ok to brilliant and a couple
that are very funny and sexually quite adult for a Hong Kong where sex can
often be treated in a demeaning manner or a childish one. My only complaint
is that I didn't like the endings on a few of them - they seemed unfinished.
But I guess that is the nature of short films. This is also a fine showcase
for a number of young actors.
The highlights for me were Vis Major in which a husband and wife separately
see someone to talk about their sex lives and one specific sexual encounter
and have very different views of it. It's a Festival Today stars Eason Chen
and Isabel Chan who live together but she considers sex off limits. He begins
the campaign to get oral sex from her - it won't hurt, like a lollypop, just
a little bit, just a touch, a kiss trying to to wear her down. Recharge is
simple enough - Chapman To reserves a girl from Shanghai (Zhang Zheng) to
have sex with in a hotel and after the deed is done he realizes what he really
needs is human contact of a different kind.
In Junior a marketer for an Assassin company goes to a good customer and
offers him a freebie - but it will be done by a trainee, like in a barber
shop. The trainee (Shawn Yue) goes to kill the target but they end up sharing
a bong. And my favorite and the longest was Ah Wai The Big Head which is
about friendship, life, the strange turns life can take. It stars Gillian
Chung and Stephy Tang as two friends in school and takes us to years after.
Gillian is so adorably cute in this that it makes you want to go beat the
hell out of Edison Chen (who was in a very short film in this) for causing
her the trouble he did. Scumbag.
