words rachel mok

Three women, love and man entrapment in a big city – it may sound familiar but Tsui Hark has a feel for women.

From the wushu-dominated Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983) to the romantic A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) or Green Snake (1993), Tsui has made muses of some of Hong Kong cinema’s best actresses. His latest cinematic offering, All About Women, takes it even further – the title says it all. Set in Beijing, the comedy revolves around three women striving for love and happiness. Is this then a modern rendition of one of Tsui’s best works, 1986’s Beijing Opera Blues? Not according to the director.

“The two films are very different,” he says. “Beijing Opera Blues is about how three women survive in the face of the time they are living in.” The film was set in the chaotic era of Yuan Shikai’s presidency of the Republic of China. “But All About Women is about the pursuit of happiness of today’s women, and it is more of a comedy.” Doesn’t that make the film China’s Sex and the City? “Not every film about some women will be like Sex and the City,” laughs the director, who, incidentally, did watch the series. “I think Chinese women have a very different view on love and sex from Americans. They have different ways to express themselves as well, so I don’t think people should put the two films together.”

All About Women – ironically – was initiated after a night of heavy drinking in Beijing’s summer heat two years ago. The director woke up with a serious hangover and the line ‘not all women are bad’ on a painting caught his eye. Various images of women coursed through his already spinning brain and he started creating characters and putting them down on paper. As the project progressed, he chose Korean director Kwak Jae-yong – whose reputation for portraying the many facets of a woman was built on such films as My Sassy Girl (2001) and the recent Cyborg Girl (2008) – as the screenwriter. Surprisingly, the two have known each other for more than a decade.
“I was doing promotional work for Once Upon a Time in China in Seoul and attended a seminar. He was there and so we met,” 58-year-old Tsui recalls. “He said he wanted to come visit me in Hong Kong and I asked him to learn some Cantonese first,” he chuckles. “We haven’t seen each other a lot but we met again in Hong Kong after My Sassy Girl.” Tsui took on Kwak for his sharp observations of women – he finds the Korean’s insights unique. Who would have thought the Korean’s university major was in physics? “His films have always been about women. He is creating the perfect woman in his mind through his films. The fragility and toughness in women he observes is very different from what I had in mind,” says Tsui of his 49-year-old Korean counterpart. “All About Women will be a good example of that. I was so curious about what he would create that we have already been talking about our next project.”

The collaborative process has been somewhat complicated – Kwak wrote the script in Korean before it was translated into Chinese. Tsui then commented on and amended the Chinese version before it was translated back into Korean – that was re-edited by Kwak and retranslated into Chinese and so on. “Maybe there is something lost in translation, but we did discuss everything down to every minor detail. The process is invaluable,” maintains Tsui. The film, focusing on three women of different age groups and social levels – the gorgeous 31-year-old CEO Tang Lu, radiologist and man manipulator Fan Fan and rock babe Tie Ling in love with an imaginary lover – is Tsui’s attempt to open a door in China’s movie market.

“China is progressing and a lot of opportunities turn up, and I think it is very interesting to investigate today’s women,” he says. “There are a lot of dramas and war films coming out in China but not comedies. I want to explore more possibilities for women’s comedy because there are simply too few. I hope to give more choices for audiences.” At the same time he is yielding actresses more choices as well. Zhou Xun, for example, is playing a role completely different from anything she has done before – a lame girl with over-sized glasses whose body freezes when she has physical contact with a male. “I have known her for many years, and I really want to turn her image upside down. This is a great challenge for her – usually she plays lovely or sad roles but for this one she is rigid and terrible in human relationships.”

All About Women is also Tsui’s return to his comedic beginnings. His first major achievement was All the Wrong Clues (1981), a hysterical black comedy starring Eric Tsang, George Lam and Karl Maka, which brought him the Best Director title at the Golden Horse Awards. While his recent works include the thriller Missing (2008), the bold, experimental Triangle (2007) and the wushu saga Seven Swords (2005), All About Women is the first comedy he has directed in years. He has found picking up the genre again easy. “There are already a lot of gags in the script, so when I filmed it, it was not too difficult,” he says. “Plus the cast is great and while filming I was just thinking how to make the movie happier for the audience, so I did have an enjoyable time shooting.”

Nevertheless, love, as the proverb says, is a battlefield – and the newest and strongest weapon women can use are sexual pheromones, the chemicals we produce to attract a mate. This is the weapon Fan Fan manipulates to seduce the men she wants. “It is down to one moral: who wins and who loses,” says Tsui. “It is about a fight for one’s happiness and how to win another’s love. After all, everything – say work and love – is a war zone.” And so, for him, pheromones are a way to gain love. “The controversy is about whether we need it, and how it can affect us,” he concedes. But however unusual the way a woman tries to win someone over, not all women are bad. “What can you add after ‘not all women are bad’? Would it be ‘so men don’t love them’, or ‘so they are good’? I hope to give the audience space to complete the sentence themselves.”

All About Women opens on December 11.