An beautifully shot and edited independent film about a woman coming to terms with the fact that her marriage isn’t working because she is in fact a lesbian. The film is well done, but does suffer a little from the Hong Kong love scenes (IE only kissing on the lips, and no nudity. And the kissing might have made the film feel a little more realistic), but overall is still a good and well done film, with some great performances. Particularly Eric Kot Man Fai and Josie Ho Chiu Yu. Certainly well worth checking out, and good to see what a well done indie film coming out of Hong Kong.

REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS…

Josie Ho Chiu Yi plays Flavia, a high school teacher and recently married woman with a beautiful little baby. She seems quite happy with her kind husband Ming (Eric Kot), but things start to surface from her past when she meets the youn and beautiful singer named Yip (Tian Yuan, damn is she cute). Falvia is immediately attracted to Yip, and can’t stop seeing her or thinking about her, and it brings out some painful memories of her past.

The film is told with in dual narratives, with Flavia (Isabel Chan Yat Ning) playing her in the 1980′s when she was in high school, and fell in love with her best friend Jin (Joman Chiang Cho Man). The two ended up living together for 3 years, until Flavia’s mother found out and forced her to stop seeing her friend. Jin had stopped going to school and was crushed and ended up becoming a Buddhist monk. This guilt has stayed with Flavia all her life, and she fights herself trying to comes to terms with her own sexuality.

And Ming refuses to accept it, and is willing to let it keep going as long as they remain married, but eventually Flavia gets the courage to talk to Jin again, and to admit to Ming that she is a lesbian and she wants a divorce and her daughter as well.

Josephine Ho really gives a powerful performance of the woman who is trying to come to terms with her own desires as well as her past, which has shaded her entire life, and Eric Kot is really impressive, and incredibly sad as her kind and caring husband.

True some of the film doesn’t seem to draw the story forward, but does show the love between Flavia and Jin, and shown with interesting grainy shots at important moments showing the strength of the feelings. Still the film could probably have been much more powerful if it had been edited down a bit to get the really important elements.

The film is also incredibly well shot and edited, though of course the flashback sequences are not entirely accurate to the time, with TV’s that have much too flat screens that they want the events of Tianamen square on, and it seems more likely they would have been shooting on video in the late 80′s than on film, but still a good film.