words yvonne teh

The world of Hong Kong prostitute dramas is a far cry from, and often far grittier than, Hollywood’s romanticized versions.

Italian directing legend Federico Fellini won a Best Foreign Film Oscar for Nights of Cabiria back in 1957. Kenzo Mizoguchi’s even earlier Streets of Shame (1956) is considered to be a true classic of world cinema and one of the Japanese master auteur’s best works. The last film with which Japanese film god Akira Kurosawa is associated – he wrote its script – was released four years after his death and called The Sea is Watching (2002).

All those films are of a common genre yet, for all their fame, it’s the cinema of Hong Kong that many a film fan most readily associates with the distinctive category of movies known as prostitute dramas. Worlds apart from the set-in-Hong Kong but obviously Hollywood production that was The World of Suzie Wong (1960), the local Hong Kong offerings – one early example, produced by the venerable Shaw Brothers and directed by New Wave auteur Angela Chan, was pointedly entitled My Name Ain’t Suzie (1985) – tend to be far more melodramatic and less romantic; preferring to emphasize the tragic over the sentimental, the ability to endure over the pursuit of dreams, personal and professional sisterhood over any sort of romanticized relations.

Laden as they are with unvarnished titles like Girls Without Tomorrow (1992), one might understandably be moved to wonder who would want to sit through such works whose stories alone could drive viewers to despair. The chances are, though, that those brave enough to take in one of these admitted tearjerkers will be rewarded by winning and often gutsy performances by charismatic actresses. As a case in point: The versatile Sylvia Chang – director, scriptwriter, producer, singer and actress with multiple movie credits to her name – won a HK Film Awards (HKFA) Best Actress prize for her role as a flesh trader in Lawrence Lau’s acclaimed Queen of Temple Street (1988).

In the heyday of this genre back in the 1990s, it seemed that every actress, big name or not, took on a prostitute role at least once in her career. Don’t believe us? Then try to name one thespian in Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk’s considerably talented generation who has not played a call girl! Among those who can claim to have ‘been there, done that’ are the illustrious likes of Carina Lau (Gigolo and Whore 1 (1991); Girls Without Tomorrow), Cecilia Yip – whose portrayal of an alcoholic hooker in Call Girl ’92 (1992) is one for the ages – and Carrie Ng (Call Girl ’88 (1988); The First Time is the Last Time (1989); Call Girl ’92; and Candlelight Woman (1995)).

As for Maggie Cheung herself: that much honoured thespian – whose Best Actress prizes include awards at the Cannes and Berlin international film festivals as well as from Hong Kong and Taipei – might well wish these days to distance herself from some of the early history of her illustrious career. Nonetheless, the fact remains that she played her share of ‘working girls’ in prostitute dramas like Call Girl ’88 and Moon, Star, Sun (1988) as well as the not-prostitute-specific The Iceman Cometh (1989), Twin Dragons (1992) and The Mad Monk (1993).

Last year, Herman Yau’s Whispers and Moans had its world premiere at the HK International Film Festival where he was officially the Director in Focus, and then a solid run in local theatres. Starring Athena Chu Yan (whose red-bikini-clad figure threatened to cause accidents when it graced giant posters at strategic locales a few years back) and other respectable thespians like Candice Yu On-on, Whispers had the distinction of being the first serious prostitute drama out of Hong Kong for some time. For all of its markings as an international film festival favourite though, it didn’t exactly trigger a new wave of prostitute dramas out of the Fragrant Harbour.

Still, this is not to say prostitute characters have vanished from local screens in recent years. Just two years ago, film doyen Patrick Tam Ka Ming’s multiple award-winning comeback film, After This Our Exile, had the lovely Kelly Lin playing a lonely hooker. Also Cecilia Cheung, one of the more well known – and now, post Edison Chen photo scandal, notorious as well – names of her 20-something-year-old generation, followed up her high-profile debut as a raspy-voiced club girl in Stephen Chow’s King of Comedy (1999) some 20-odd movies later with a dubbed role as a Mainland Chinese streetwalker in Derek Yee’s grim One Nite in Mongkok (2004).

Additionally, after many years of portraying ungainly females in movies as diverse as girls-with-guns offering The Inspector Wears Skirts (1988), Chinese New Year comedy All’s Well, Ends Well (1992) and wuxia farce Holy Weapon (1993), Sandra Ng became a Golden Horse and HKFA Best Actress winner with Golden Chicken (2002), an entertaining comedy-drama that saw her in the role of an ugly duckling turned ‘chicken’ (the Cantonese slang term for prostitute) with a heart of gold. Then, unwilling to leave a golden goose alone, she and director Samson Chiu followed that up a year later with the more uneven – but still not without its merits and goose-bump moments – Golden Chicken 2 (2003).

But, lest it not yet be clear, movies with prostitute characters aren’t necessarily prostitute dramas. More specifically, prostitute dramas don’t only have streetwalkers as central characters, they also tend to send out particular messages that their sex workers are the kind of women others can view as compatriots, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God figures or even inspirations rather than threats, enemies and opponents in a battle for their loved ones’ attentions.

Thus it’s not for nothing that Sylvia Chang is moved to proclaim at one point in Queen of Temple Street: “A toast to women. All women who without fathers, without mothers, without husbands, still survive. Still stand on their own feet.” For the subjects of local prostitute dramas have been accorded treatment that can be generally described as uncommonly respectable and even respectful; and have frequently been revealed as regular human beings with friends and, often enough, dependants who rely on the income the working women earn by satisfying the sexual needs of whoever can and is willing to pay for their services.