Whispers and Moans
Director: Herman Yau
Year: 2007
Rating: 7.5
"Better to be a whore than a mistress"
"What job can be better than being a whore? Tell me"
There are two Herman Yau films that I have had for ages and never watched.
I just thought they would be too downbeat - full of tragedies big and small,
of defilement, beatings, pain, sorrow. Both of them were made around the
same time in 2007 and 2008 and they explore the world of sex-workers or PR
Girls or prostitutes or whores or call girls or Karaoke Girls or chickens
(gai). Whatever you want to call them. This one and True Women for Sale.
It is a world that intrudes into many Hong Kong films but nearly always as
an adjunct to a story about men who indulge in that world. Triad films in
which the women are there for amusement or abasement. Rarely focused on the
women themselves. And if so, it is usually the story of one woman and her
downward spiral.
A few come to mind. The Golden Chicken films, Girls Without Tomorrow, The
Call Girl films (88, 92, 94), Fruit Chan's Prostitute Trilogy - but none
of them cover as much territory as this one does and as objectively. There
is no great drama here, no tragedy, some regret for sure, some scares but
it is as if a camera was just observing the lives of a group of women in
a Karaoke nightclub plus a street transsexual saving up money for the operation
and a gigolo who loves him. The film is neither sympathetic nor condemnatory.
The men are near footnotes in the lives of these women. Targets of derision,
ATM's, too often impotent. For ten days the lives of these women are followed.
It is based on a book by Yang Yee-shan, who I expect is portrayed as the
woman who wants to organize them to demand rights for sex-workers.
Every night the girls report for duty at the club to the two Mamasans - Coco
(Athena Chu) and Jenny (Candice Yu-on) and as the customers come in they
line up at the door to be chosen or rejected. Into the rooms they go to drink,
flirt, sing, converse, make promises rarely kept - and either the men take
them out or they don't. Not a lot of time is spent on this process - nor
any of the sexual transactions - it is mainly the girls sitting in the back
room chatting and waiting to be called by the Mamasan to sit with a man.
The dialogue rings true - talking about their last customer, the cheap ones,
their lives. "I already had three big ones!" "Before midnight?" "Now is the
time for big bucks". "I had to spend 90-minutes on a blow-job and I still
could not get him up and he blamed me".
All in the same business but with different stories. What got them here,
what their plans are. Nana (Mandy Chiang) and her sister Aida (Monie Tung)
did it for their incapacitated father but Aida has become a heroin addict
and Nana has met a nice guy in the real world who wants to marry her but
doesn't know about her other life. Happy (Chan Wai-ting in her only HK film
credit) is from the Mainland as many of the girls are - she has been at it
for seven years and almost has enough money to set up a school with her husband
back home. The gigolo (Patrick Tang) is in love with a transsexual (Don Li)
and tells him - in perhaps a reference to He's a Woman, She's a Man - "I
don't care if you are a man or a woman, I will love you". And really not
a lot happens - a few disease scares, a broken heart, renewed hope - this
is life - no defilement, no beatings, no pain. In a way they are no different
than women working together anywhere, but with a bond that is created stronger
than steel. The girls are a tribe of sorts - stick together, lend money,
lend a shoulder to cry on. You do what you have to do in this life.
