Hearty Response (Yi gai yun tian, 1986)

Norman Law

Hong Kong

89 mins, color, Cantonese (English subtitles)

Kwong Sun (Joey Wang) is an illegal immigrant who's crossed over from mainland China into Hong Kong. The person who runs the smuggling operation, Snake Man (Wai Shum) is your cookie-cutter villain, who tries to molest Sun instead of helping her. She breaks a bottle over his head and makes her escape only to get involved in a freak accident courtesy of two bumbling HK cops, one of whom is Ho Ting-Bon (Chow Yun-Fat). Fearing disciplinary punishment, Bon and his partner don't report the accident but instead take Sun to a hospital, where Bon pretends to be her husband. She wakes up and, having no place to go, decides to beat the two at their own game, so she fakes amnesia and starts calling Bon her husband.

Of course, everything is full of silly humor as Bon at first tries to get rid of Sun, who seems to upset all his plans: Bon's peeved fiancee hates her, his mother loves her, and he seems to want to help anyway. He finds out that she really is a "stowaway" but decides not to turn her in. The romantic comedy slowly unfolds as Sun and Bon (predictably) fall in love. I was about to break out the champagne to celebrate the inevitable happy ending.

I should have known better. Never ever assume you know the ending to a Hong Kong film. With the first 75 minutes trickling away in harmless stupor, I was enjoying Joey and Yun-Fat's antics as much as the next guy when disaster struck. Snake Man reappears, having finally tracked Sun, and kidnaps her for ransom. Bon promptly pays the HK$30,000 and gets his partner to tail Snake as he goes off to his lair. There, Snake decides to punish Sun for the cut she gave him, which has left a permanent scar on his face. What follows is one of the most painful cinematic experiences I have had.

Snake viciously beats Sun, tattoos an enormous snake on her back in the most excruciating way, then brutally rapes her, and slaps her around some more. Throughout this ordeal, the idiot of a partner is waiting downstairs for Bon to show up, which he eventually does and they finally break into the apartment. Too late, Snake vanishes out the window with Bon in hot pursuit. Sun suddenly snatches the idiot partner's revolver and then dashes out as well. She manages to find Snake and then chases him down the street, shooting in full view of the astonished passers-by. She is hit by a car, but does not give up. Snake lunges into a bar where he ambushes Sun as she rushes in. He is about to kill her when Bon jumps him and they tumble to the ground. In the melee Snake shoots Bon twice but runs out of bullets. Sun then runs toward him, shooting her way, and then administers the final shot straight into his head, finishing him off.

So much for the romantic comedy.

Joey is absolutely stunning in a role that I have never seen her perform before. She has always been the charming and fleeting ghost, or (at worst) the insatiable succubus. Never have I seen her portraying a woman raped and beaten, who goes after her assailant with grim determination to wreak terrible vengeance. Her look during the split second before she pulled the trigger for the final blow was so scary, I would not want to be on its opposite end, with or without the barrel of a gun staring down at me.

Yun-Fat was merely passable. I found his silliness slightly amusing, but a bit over the top. Maybe less frivolity would have been better, but I guess the point was to take the audience completely unawares, which the film definitely did succeed in doing.

The Universe DVD is not too bad. The picture is decent, without too much noticeable pixellation, few artifacts, and usually stable natural colors (as much as one would expect from a 1980s HK production). There were some (slight) problems with the lip sync on the Cantonese track, but nothing too distracting. The DVD also has the usual extras: a theatrical trailer, four previews for other films, and star bios for Joey and Yun-Fat. The English subtitles were decent, with very few spelling mistakes and not many glaring grammatical errors. The bold, bright, legible type was a plus too. For $5, the DVD has a great price/value ratio.

July 14, 2001. BLS