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DVD
ARIZTICAL ENT
Publisher: Ariztical Entertainment
Format: NTSC, Subtitled
Actors: Zhou Yiemang; Cui Zien; Cui Zi'en; Yang Zhiying; Jin Yi; Huang Sihong; Ping Yuan; Wang Feng; Xiong Dailin; Zhang Liya
Set in the city that was once considered the Paris of the East, we see that here, everyone has their price. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR Age: 631008060095 UPC: 631008060095 Manufacturer No: CQC600
Cantonese with English subtitles. An erotic-drama exploring the lives of Shanghai s sex trade workers, first there's the Madame who hires young attractive men and women for prostitution. Then we meet a cocky young man who thinks himself a gigolo but quickly learns what it means to work as a whore. The john who only hires young attractive men for his pleasures. There's the faded would-be diva who presents for a local cable channel and earns extra money on the side by "restoring hymens." Next there's her estranged husband, the gay man who married her to help her get back to the city after the Cultural Revolution but left her as soon as she had given birth to their son. Finally there's the boy himself, the withdrawn, disturbed son of this marriage of convenience and his puppy.
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| Cutting edge feature from China |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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As in his ground-breaking Shanghai Panic, Andrew Cheng here starts from the perception that Shanghai has lost whatever social and moral restraints it ever chafed under. This time he focuses on older (but not necessarily more mature) characters and uses a more conventional one-thing-leads-to-another structure to explore their variously damaged lives. First there's the cocky young man who fancies his chances as a gigolo but quickly learns what it means to work as a whore. Then there's the faded would-be diva who presents for a local cable channel and earns extra money on the side by `restoring' the odd hymen. Next there's her estranged husband, the gay man who married her to help her get back to the city after the Cultural Revolution but left her as soon as she'd borne their son. And finally there's the boy himself, the withdrawn, disturbed son of this marriage of convenience. Cheng smartly divides the film between documentary-style scenes and stylised, theatrical tableaux, linking the two with digitally manipulated images of the city. The ensemble, which shades from black comedy into a delicate melancholy, adds up to a persuasive anatomy of China's new emotional and sexual economy. Screened in competition at the 2003 Rotterdam Film Festival, where it was awarded the Fipresci Prize.
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