Considering
she looks like Zhou Xun, Angie really shouldn’t have to resort to a lot of
game-playing. Unfortunately, she has carried a torch for Marco, her colleague
and former classmate so long, he now takes her for granted. When a flirty
game-player stakes a claim to the oblivious platonic friend, Angie will have to
learn how to fight fire with fire. The battle will be joined in Pang Ho-cheung’s
Women Who Flirt (trailer here), which opens this Wednesday in New York.
Shocked
to learn her longtime best friend is suddenly serious about a woman who is not
herself, Angie calls on her eye-lash batting chum May to form a kitchen cabinet
of proud Shanghai flirters to advise her. However, she finds their recommended
baby talk and helpless damsel-in-distress routines absolutely vapid. She is
just not equipped for this fight and her rival Hailey knows it. Still, if she
can get dumb old Marco alone for a romantic getaway in Taiwan, she just might
have a puncher’s chance.
Yes,
there are similarities between Flirt and
My Best Friend’s Wedding and its
tragically romantic Chinese-Korean reconfiguration, A Wedding Invitation, but Zhou’s Angie is a protagonist we can
really get behind. Her withering stares and palpable disgust at the Sex in the City antics going on around
her are often quite funny and highly sympathetic. Frankly, she is just too cool
for everyone else in the film.
Of
course, Flirt will eventually settle
into a sentimental rom-com, but at least it takes a rainy day trip to the Ju Ming Museum, which looks incredible (so good tourist tip there). In fact, Zhou and
Ju are just about enough to carry the film across the finish line. Sonia Sui
certainly looks like a deceptively cute femme fatale and shows some convincing
claws when the time comes. Still, it is hard to see why they would fight over a
blockhead like Marco, played rather woodenly by Huang Xiaoming. In contrast, Xie
Yilin constantly kicks up the energy while inhaling scenery as May, the Obiwan
of flirters.
