CUTE GIRL. (1980) WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY HOU HSIAO-HSIEN. STARRING KENNY BEE, ANTHONY CHAN AND FONG FEI FEI.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
'EUREKA ENTERTAINMENT to release EARLY HOU HSIAO-HSIEN: THREE FILMS 1980-1983: CUTE GIRL/THE GREEN, GREEN GRASS OF HOME/THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI. A two-disc set of formative films by one of world cinema's greatest directors, on Blu-Ray for the first time anywhere in the world from 16th April 2018. As part of The Masters Of Cinema Series featuring a Limited Edition O-card (First 2,000 copies only).'
This is a romantic comedy, filmed in Mandarin Chinese by one of the figureheads of Taiwanese cinema, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, who was actually born in China. Quite the international flavour to the whole thing, lol.
In 1948, the year after Hou Hsiao-Hsien was born, his family fled the Chinese Civil War and ended up in Taiwan, where the little lad grew up to be one of the foremost movers and shakers in the Taiwanese New Wave Movement.
It's nice when someone moves to a new country and then proceeds to greatly contribute to that nation's cultural, sporting or economic life, as did this young fella here. The Germans certainly struck it lucky when Hitler moved to their lovely country from Austria, didn't they...? Ah, I'm only kidding. I'm sure he did a few good things for that nation too. Just a shame about the whole Second World War thing, lol.
CUTE GIRL, also known as LOVABLE YOU, is a Taiwanese rom-com, something I probably hadn't even known existed until I watched this film, haha. It concerns a guy and a girl and their love affair that starts off unpromisingly and then kind of works its way up to the status of 'going steady.'
The young lady, an attractive business-woman known as Panda to her girlfriends (they all have cutesie-pie animal nicknames based around their frequent trips to the zoo!), lives with her parents and, so it seems, her grandparents as well. You know that whole extended family thing they do.
I commend and applaud it, actually, and I wish we did it here. My kids are already actively discussing the Home For The Bewildered in which they're planning to dump me the second my scattiness crosses that paper-thin line between being endearing and being a liability. The kind of liabilty, that is, that wanders down the street at night in her Old-Lady-From-TITANIC-style nightie, calling to a doggie who chased his last postman the year Kennedy was assassinated...
Anyway, Panda's parents, in particular her businessman father, are desperate to get their beautiful daughter safely married off before she hooks up with some unsuitable yobbo. Now I wouldn't call the guy who first falls in love with her when he sees her on the street an unsuitable yobbo, exactly, but he's certainly something of a wild card. An unknown quantity, as it were.
This fella- we'll call him The Guy- is actually a land surveyor, which I would have thought was a good respectable officey-type job, good enough to satisfy the fussiest prospective father-in-law. He first sees Panda on the street as she drives her sports car to work while he sits mooning about atop his moped. What a winner, eh? Snigger.
If this film had been a cartoon, you would have seen his heart pounding out of his chest with a kind of boom-boom pounding noise and lovehearts floating around his ecstatic mug. He probably in all reality never expects to see her again, such is often the way of these split-second encounters, but fate has other plans.
Panda decides to take a break from her parents and their constant attempts to match-make for her, a process in which she has pretty much no involvement. Her parents and their age group obviously believe in the concept of arranged marriage, but it's clear that Panda secretly would prefer to be left alone to choose her own life-partner. Not unreasonably, one supposes.
She gets extremely frustrated with the whole thing. Feeling suffocated and hemmed-in, she runs away to her Auntie's house in the countryside. She promises her father before she goes that she will return, so not to panic, and when she comes back, all refreshed and clear-headed once more, she'll play the dutiful daughter and marry the man of her father's choice.
Whom should she meet while staying at her Auntie's house in the countryside but this land surveyor fella...? He's come down with a bunch of his land surveyor pals to, well, survey a bit of land, in particular the bit that surrounds a poor civilian's house, because some big company is planning to build a road right through this guy's house whether he agrees to it or not.
Anyway, Panda and The Guy are destined to meet again and meet again they most assuredly do. A love affair that's never quite sure of itself starts up tentatively, much of it spent in the environs of something the wacky locals call The Lover's Tree.
Panda is initially reluctant to carve her name with The Guy's for everyone to see on this rather interesting tree (Seriously, you wouldn't know whether to climb it or read it...!), but a telephone call from her angry father, telling her to get her arse back up to town pronto to meet the guy he's lined up for her to marry, might help her to make up her mind. One way or the other...
This is just such a lively, brightly-coloured, pop-py, bouncy, upbeat kind of film, it's impossible to watch it without grinning like an idiot the whole way through. Love is in the air and it's the sort of film where you'd be gobsmacked if the loving couple in it didn't end up spliced.
I'd kind of like to know what happened to the guy whose house was going to have a road built right through it, but the film-maker clearly didn't deem this man's dilemma to be a priority consideration. I hope the guy wasn't made homeless or had to turn to a life of crime to support himself and his family or anything.
I mean, was his house razed to the ground or what? Or did the road quite literally bisect his little dwelling and the man have to build himself an outhouse across the street like he was worried about in the beginning? I feel sad for us that we'll never know.
The film has a lot of social commentary in it with the whole arranged marriage stuff which, even in the 'Eighties, women like the independently-minded Panda were seemingly beginning to rebel against. I don't actually know how much arranged marriage still exists in the world today but I'd be really interested to know. I bet you any money that there are parts of the world today where it still happens.
I wouldn't mind an arranged marriage myself if the guy was hot and had all his wits about him and everything in the, um, shall we say, basement area was in good working order. That's the kind of arranged marriage I could get on board with.
My ideal guy would have to love films, be good with a hammer and nails around the house and be willing to cook pretty much every night. And, um, wash up afterwards and do any little bits of ironing that needed doing. Well, I need my delicate lickle fingies for tapping at the keys. I don't need to be immersing 'em in any dirty old dish-water...
The trouble is, you never really know what you're getting, arranged-husband-wise, until the wedding night. If only beds could talk, can you imagine the stories they might tell about disastrous, hilarious or even downright shocking wedding nights? Now, that's a bestseller I'd pay good moolah to read...
'EUREKA ENTERTAINMENT to release EARLY HOU HSIAO-HSIEN: THREE FILMS 1980-1983: CUTE GIRL/THE GREEN, GREEN GRASS OF HOME/THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI. A two-disc set of formative films by one of world cinema's greatest directors, on Blu-Ray for the first time anywhere in the world from 16th April 2018. As part of The Masters Of Cinema Series featuring a Limited Edition O-card (First 2,000 copies only).'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens' fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
You can contact Sandra at:
http://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com
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