Fighting for Love
Reviewed by YTSL
Pathetic but true: There are certain actors
and actresses who I honestly have enjoyed watching doing such utterly mundane
things as grocery shopping (Brigitte Lin and Chow Yun-Fat in “Dream Lovers”),
getting their hair washed (Brigitte Lin -- again! -- in “Starry is the Night”
and Sylvia Chang in “Forever and Ever”), drinking a bottle of Coke (Brigitte
Lin -- once more! -- in “Morning Fog” and “Run Lover Run”), eating cans of
pineapple (Takeshi Kaneshiro in “Chungking Express”), feeding someone grapes
(Ruby Wong in “Expect the Unexpected”) and frying an egg (Ruby Wong again
-- this time in “Where a Good Man Goes”). It is hoped that whoever
chooses to watch the Joe Ma helmed romance that stars Tony Leung Chiu Wai
and Sammi Cheng does or will feel this way about at least one, but preferably
both, of the film’s leads. Otherwise, the chances of this 2001 movie’s
viewers being able to derive any pleasure from a cinematic offering in which
nothing truly consequential or unpredictable happens will be very slim indeed.
The hole-filled and sometimes quite improbable plot of FIGHTING FOR LOVE
goes as follows: On their way to the hospital (Little Tony Leung’s
Veg Chiang character is transporting his sick mother to see a doctor while
Sammi Cheng’s Deborah Fok character is going to visit her already admitted
elder sister), the car driven by the movie’s lead female knocks a side window
off of the male protagonist’s van. In the hospital car park, an irate
Veg -- who is rather ironically named, seeing as he is the boss of Gut Lee,
a restaurant specializing in “cooked bull organs” (which probably include
that which is euphemistically known in the U.S. as “Rocky Mountain Oysters)
-- confronts an unrepentant Deborah, who reacts against his angrily kicking
her car by calling the police. Told by the policewoman who responded
to this call to settle things on their own, the two hot-heads agree to meet
shortly afterwards in a bar, get drunk, and end up in bed with each other.
The morning after sees Deborah feeling very happy and Veg feeling very guilty
since it turns out that he has a girlfriend named Mindy (who happens to be
a TV star who looks to be as popular with Veg’s family as her fans).
Deborah’s happiness dissipates even before she finds this out about Veg though,
since she gets sacked from her job -- for a costly mistake she insists was
made by the boss’ wife rather than herself -- later that same day and, while
still in a daze from her job loss, proceeds to incur the ire of her father
by losing his pet dog while supposedly taking it out for a walk. Rather
than stay in their apartment and have to listen to her father ranting at
her, and with no other place that she could think of to go to, she goes to
the hospital in which her sister is a patient, and asks to be given a place
to sleep there.
On a visit to the hospital in which his mother (also) has been (temporarily)
warded, Veg spots Deborah (whose surely uncommon request the hospital had
actually acceded to!), she spots him, and ends up pouring out her woes to
him. To his query of what can he do to make her feel better, she asks
that he tell her that he loves her. Instead of lying to her, he comes
out and tells her that he can’t honestly do so because he actually has a
girlfriend (who, conveniently -- as it turns out -- for the purposes of the
story, happened to have gone off to Japan, thereby leaving Veg with plenty
of time to spend with and on others). Although she is obviously not
ecstatic to learn this, Deborah takes the news better than one might expect
her to, and thereby looks to have earned Veg’s respect, if not love.
Shortly afterwards, FIGHTING FOR LOVE’s three scriptwriters -- who consist
of director Joe Ma, sometime director Aubrey Lam (she it was who helmed as
well as wrote the script for “Twelve Nights”) and Taures Chow -- seem to
have really asked the movie’s viewers to take a big leap of faith or something,
because Deborah and Veg quickly and easily appear to have become bosom buddies,
and she just as suddenly and without much ado ends up lodging in the big
house in which the actually pretty wealthy man lives with his eccentric family
(N.B. News that Andy Lau still lives with his parents should establish, if
not confirm, that this would not be an unheard of arrangement in present-day
Hong Kong). Also around this time, the film -- whose major saving grace
lies in its having the charismatic lead actor and actress that it does --
seems to slow down considerably pace-wise, and this is when a considerable
amount of footage gets devoted to showing Little Tony and the one and only
Sammi doing not much more than hanging out together, leisurely and happily
eating ice cream, attempting to drown their sorrows by gulping down cans
of not particularly alcoholic beer and just plain luxuriating in each other’s
company.
Although this (re)viewer never for a moment expected FIGHTING FOR LOVE to
have something other than a happy ending, she has to admit that there were
points in this utterly unambitious and featherweight -- yet quite charming
as well as surprisingly relaxing -- film that got her wondering whether Veg
and Deborah really might be content to be good friends and nothing more than
that. Somewhere along the line though, what with Veg’s mother (veteran
actress Lee Fung’s appearance in this movie is not much more than an extended
cameo) telling Deborah that she ought to “fight for love”, and Mindy (who
is played by Niki Chow) turning out to not be as nice as she had initially
seemed, the story’s final outcome -- one which I trust will not disappoint
the bulk of its viewers -- becomes abundantly clear.
My rating for the film: 6.5