He & She
Director: Lawrence Cheng
Year: 1994
Rating: 6.0/6.5
Anita Yuen stars
in this along with Tony Leung Kar Fai in a lightweight romantic comedy/drama.
Basically, she gets pregnant from a dirty rat of a fellow (Lawrence Cheng)
who she didn't realize was married and who of course wants nothing to do
with her after a quick sexual interlude. So she then considers abortion due
to her financial plight, but her friend Tony proposes marriage so that she
can have the child and he promises to help raise it. So she marries her best
friend.
The problem is that he is gay (his favorite star is Aaron Kwok) - but he
is a wonderful father. As one would expect, there are many complications
such as the now divorced father coming back and wanting to marry Anita, claim
the child and move to Australia. In the meantime though, Tony has had a certain
reaction below the waist when Anita gave him a friendly hug and kiss. He
is clearly shocked, confused and somewhat humiliated. In order to test this
new sensation he peeks at Christine Ng in the shower - phew, no visible
reaction - he kisses Annabelle Lau - again no reaction. Obviously it was
only a momentary aberration - until Anita massages his back and that certain
tingle returns. Yes, Anita has cured his homosexuality! The Christian Right
has endorsed this film! He realizes in fact that a love for a woman has snuck
up on him. The film has some funny and sweet moments and good performances
from Anita (both in short and long haired mode) and Tony, but basically the
film is modest and somewhat predictable fare.
My rating for this film: 6.0.
Reviewed by YTSL
For a variety of reasons, there are quite a few
Hong Kong movies that would not travel well across certain cultural borders.
Although local viewers probably consider that which stars Anita Yuen and
Tony Leung Kar Fai to be inoffensive as well as entertaining fluff (and voted
with their feet and wallets to make it the 15th highest grossing Hong Kong
film of 1994), I’d wager that this romantic offering contains elements that
would outrage an equal measure of Western liberals and conservatives; what
with its featuring a “homosexual conversion” and depictions of gay men as
limp-wristed fellows yet also taking pains to convey the message that non-heterosexual
individuals and their life choices can be as morally upstanding as -- and
in some cases, better than certain -- heterosexual ones.
Some other aspects of HE & SHE that different people might find problematic
include there being a 14 year gap between its male and female leads (who
nonetheless had previously played a couple in two other efforts), the main
characters possessing a dangerous inclination to have unprotected sex (even
when going to bed with someone they don’t know all that well), and the production
containing what must be one of the least believable courtroom scenes ever
filmed (whose credibility gets stretched by the presiding justice being portrayed
Law Kar Ying). For my money, the first one third or so of the movie
-- which details how Yee entered the lives of a costume designer named Kai
(played by Big Tony) and his two rambunctious close friends (Wai Wai is essayed
by Christine Ng and Pai by Annabelle Lau) -- also struck the wrong chord
by being too breezy and frivolous in tone and feel.
When this was followed by a heavy-handed, guilt-ridden section in which Anita
Yuen’s Yee pregnant character contemplates whether or not to have an abortion
after belatedly finding out that her lover was a married man who had gone
off -- initially presumably permanently -- to Australia, I got pretty close
to calling it a day as far as this work was concerned. Looking back,
I’m glad I didn’t though; not least since HE & SHE really did seem to
take a turn for the better from around the time that Yee and Kai made the
decision to get married (so that Yee’s carried-to-term baby wouldn’t be an
illegitimate child). For one thing, the previously overly ebullient
Yee started acting more serious (And while I do often enjoy Anita Yuen playing
for laughs, I actually reckon that she’s a better dramatic than comic actress).
For another, this also was when Kai got noticeably less campy as well as
more caring.
As she and he warmed up to each other, so did I towards the pair of them,
the two other good-hearted members of their close-knit coterie and the movie
as a whole. Once this happened, I found myself able to: Suspend
my disbelief that, among other things, a man (like that played by Jacob Cheung)
would willingly entrust a neophyte stockbroker like Yee with HK$600,000 of
his hard earned, life-time savings and not pay dearly for doing so; as well
as be happy to relax and enjoy watching HE & SHE slowly but surely wend
along its -- if truth be told -- not entirely unpredictable course.
As for Kai’s coming to have more than ‘sisterly’ -- Hong Kong (movie) convention
appears to dictate that gay men be taken to be honorary women -- and other
platonic feelings for Yee: His disclosing that he had been besotted
by a female prior to having his first boyfriend made me easily inclined to
think of him as being bisexual rather than homosexual, and therefore liable
to fall for a good friend who happened to be of the opposite sex from him
and his previous lovers.
N.B. HE & SHE’s two stars and its director, Lawrence Cheng (who also
took on the role of the villain of the piece), had figured one year earlier
in a UFO production entitled “Tom, Dick and Hairy”. Something that
this pair of generally light offerings have in common is a male character
who behaves in ways that would be identified as effeminate yet turns out
to not have the sexual preferences that such men are stereotypically presumed
to possess. While I wouldn’t stridently argue that either of these
innocuous movies’ makers were intent on hammering home certain socio-cultural
observations by way of their populist works, neither do I plan to go about
dismissively asserting -- as Paul Fonoroff did in his “At the Hong Kong Movies”
book -- that “Films have the power to both entertain and enlighten, but you’d
never know it from...[viewing] HE & SHE” (1998:397).
My rating for this film: 6.5