Starring: Gigi Leung, Fiona Sit, Yuen Siu Yee, George Lam, Nie Yuen, Kevin Cheng, Hints Cheung, Hui Shiu Hung
Director: Barbara Wong Chun Chun

Time was when Gigi Leung would play the young, gangly ingénue opposite heartthrobs like Tony Leung Chiu Wai (in Dr. Mack (1995)) and Andy Lau (in Full Throttle (1996)). However, in Wonder Women, whose story opens on Handover eve and charts the dramatic events of the past 10 years in Hong Kong (primarily through the experiences of a multi-faceted female and her personal assistant-cum-friend), the now 30-something-year-old has a mature woman role while Fiona Sit is the innocent naïf.

In fairness to the singer-actress and those who awarded her this part, Leung appears generally comfortable inhabiting the character of Joy Sing, a high-powered executive who is also a loving wife and mother. However, the first quite distracting and detracting misstep of this Barbara Wong Chun Chun movie comes with the casting of George Lam – a man born three decades before the establishment of the HKSAR, who is thus 29 years older in real life than his co-star – as Joy’s hard-luck husband, To Lam. It makes their cutesy lovey-dovey scenes almost as hard to watch as that in which he painfully tries to assert his dominance in bed to assuage his feelings of general inferiority.

Another move that causes this work to lose a lot of whatever credibility it had – not least from being selected by the Chinese authorities as the official film to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Handover – is prominent product placement in its concluding section. Granted, the nature of the product allows for a few jokes and laughs but this advertorial took me right out of the movie to wondering instead how much the company in question had contributed to the making of Wonder Women.

It is a real pity as the film promised, on paper at least, to be an interesting and even inspirational tribute to different modern women along with an affecting meditation on both their burdens and the professional and personal possibilities to be had these days in Hong Kong. Be it the tea lady who works to help her son get an MBA, the energetic entrepreneur investing in and hawking all manner of consumer products or a female CFO who cares for the company’s rank and file rather than just the bottom line, this offering actually contains its share of appealing female characters whose willingness to dream and believe that nothing is impossible is what keeps them and Hong Kong going.

Bar for Joy, however, most of these characters really don’t get sufficient screen time to feel like honest-to-goodness flesh-and-blood individuals. Even second-billed Fiona Sit doesn’t get that much opportunity to shine, seeing that her character is consigned for the most part to being a rather pathetic comic clotheshorse. Still, it’s also true enough that the female characters do come across as wonder women when compared to the movie’s men, a large percentage of whom turn out to be even more flawed and fallible, if not entirely bad, humans in one way or another.

Yvonne Teh