Cupid One
In his second outing for Cinema City (Esprit D’
Amour being the first), Ringo Lam tries his hand at screwball comedy with
Sally Yeh and Mark Cheng. It contains one of the main screwball trademarks
– a slightly ditzy rich person gets involved with someone outside of their
class – and the film contains some near sublime comic moments. Unfortunately,
Lam loses his light touch for the last third of the film and the heavy
handed plot turn takes all of the wind out of this film’s sails. It is
really a shame because the first hour is very amusing.
Sally Yeh is a rich heiress engaged to the
wimpy (another screwball device) son of one of her dead father’s business
associates. On the way to her engagement party, her car breaks down and
while trying to hitch a ride she is nearly run over by Mark Cheng. In trying
to avoid her, his car swerves and ends up teetering on the edge of a steep
hill. In a funny sequence, Sally manages to get her car working and at
the same time sends his car to the bottom of the hill. She then wisely
takes off like a bat out of hell leaving him in the dust and cursing her
existence.
Later after the engagement party, a very tipsy
Sally finds her way to a yacht and falls asleep in the inviting bed. When
she wakes in the morning, she finds herself on the way to Thailand with
of course Mark Cheng at the helm. He is delivering some cargo there and
had assumed the lump in the bed was his mate. So they are stuck with each
other for ten days on the high seas.
The scene in which they discover each other’s
presence is well done and shows that Lam can be very adept at comedy. Mark
is coming out of the shower naked, Sally is under the covers naked
- and he thinking the lump is his friend continues to try to grab the covers
off, while Sally struggles to remain undiscovered and covered at the same
time. When they both all of a sudden realize what the situation is and
start trying to cover themselves up with the same material it is very clever
and wacky.
As one might expect in this type of film, there
is a clash of wills between the spoiled socialite and the gruff seaman
who thinks she is a hooker and some funny material comes from this. Then
of course comes the getting attracted to each other phase. This was all
done in a fairly sweet and engaging manner, but once they finally get to
Thailand Lam takes a turn into a slightly dark obsessive corner and the
film gets lost.
The absolutely bright spot of this film is Sally
Yeh. She shows a wonderful ability to do comedy and is completely charming
in this film. She can elicit laughs with the slightest of material and
does both physical and visual comedy quite well. And like all great female
comedians, she can be sexy when she has to.
Cheng on the other hand approaches comedy like
breaking through a brick wall. This was his debut and it feels like he
studied at he HK Acting School of SHOUTING. Nearly every line he has is
done in full vocal mode and it gets quite grating very quickly. There is
little reason to want Sally to end up with him. For some reason, I kept
thinking throughout that Chow Yun Fat (who stars with Sally in The Killer
and The Occupant) would have been great in that role. But that was not
the case unfortunately.