Just for Fun
Director: Frankie Chan
Year: 1983
Rating: 5.5
Here’s a pop quiz.
I’ll give you some clues and you have to guess the writer of the script of
this film. Back in the early 1980’s he was an unknown scriptwriter, but before
the decade was out he had become a fairly successful director and in the
next decade he became one of Hong Kong’s best-known directors. He is still
directing today. This film is a light silly comedy that contains cleavage
jokes, sexual innuendos, a horse that has firecrackers tied to its tail,
an effeminate gay body builder, gigolos on the make, a snake up a dress,
a seal butting a man into the pool from behind, a game of strip billiards,
men having their privates damaged for comical relief, accidentally eating
dog food, riding a dolphin and a crack about hairy French female legs.
That last one should have given it away of course. It was that laugh a minute
director Wong Kar-wai. He was to carry many of these same themes and sense
of humor into his later films to great acclaim. In fact, Ashes of Time is
basically a reworking of this film as Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Ka-fai
play two old gigolos stuck in the desert chasing after Brigitte Lin and Maggie
Cheung. In Days of Being Wild, Leslie and Jacky Cheung were riotously funny
as they leered at Carina Lau’s cleavage and who can forget Happy Together
in which Wong again made amusing sport of homosexuals as Leslie reenacted
the seal butting scene with Tony Leung Chiu-wai. One of the major criticisms
of his recent film 2046 was that it had no scenes of strip billiards or accidental
dog food eating as the film clearly needed a few more laughs. The audience
kept waiting for a snake to go up one of Zhang Ziyi’s cheongsam’s but it
sadly never happened. If this dearth of humor continues in his films, it
is hard to imagine that Wong Kar-wai has much more of a future.
This film is in fact directed, produced and acted in by Frankie Chan, who
put out a number of enjoyable “B” films in the 80’s and was an action star
in many others – most famously in Prodigal Son (1982) when he has one of
the classic kung fu fights against Yuen Biao. Of course years later Wong
Kar-wai was to employ Chan to write the music for three of his films – Ashes
of Time, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels. In this Chan plays Big Light
who returns home after a long absence only to discover that his recently
deceased father left his vast wealth to charity and has only given Big Light
a box that contains a scroll telling him tough luck.
His father’s major domo (Wu Ma) invites him to stay at his house where his
two grown daughters are in a prime time condition for romance and marriage.
One daughter, Tai Fung (Wong Wan Si), has been waiting for him for years,
but Big Light isn’t interested. Instead he looks up his old friend Big Mouth
(Charley Cho) who invites him to a party where they run into the King of
Cues (Melvin Wong) who seduces women with his slick pool playing. Frankie
has no problem seducing a beautiful woman as well at the party and is a little
surprised when she slips some money into his pocket – and he realizes he
is at a gigolo party.
Next he moves in with another old friend, Lemon (Liu Wai Hung) who asks the
debonair Big Light to help him romance his cousin, Sally (Sally Yeh in one
of her very early films) who makes a braless wet t-shirt entrance and then
hops on a dolphin to ride at Ocean Park. The two boys sigh and wish they
could be a dolphin for just one day. At some point The King of Cues (and
his right-hand man Tai Bo) tries to make a move on Sally, Tai Fung is kidnapped
by an older woman who wasn’t very satisfied with her gigolo service and Frankie
has to fight Bolo Yeung. In many of Chan’s films the action sequences are
topnotch, but here he keeps it very minimal even at the end when it seems
a big fight has been set up. Some of the comedy is actually fairly amusing
but not nearly enough of it and it gets tiresome pretty quickly and only
the delightful Sally keeps you watching. Still it is fascinating to
see such artistic promise from the young Wong Kar-wai as his embryonic comic
genius so cleverly bounces around from breasts to busted balls and the occasional
frog on someone’s head.
