Wayne Wang’s Life is Cheap … But Toilet Paper is Expensive

Yat Boon jai (a.k.a. “The Man with No Name”) is right about one thing when he accepts this dodgy courier gig. It would indeed be a last chance to see the real Hong Kong as it truly was before the 1997 handover, which turned out to be a national tragedy for Hongkongers. Unfortunately, the naïve Asian American with a taste for flashy cowboy apparel will be in over his head navigating the HK underworld in Wayne Wang’s Life is Cheap … But Toilet Paper is Expensive, which also had a rocky reception when it was originally released in 1989. Ripe for reappraisal, a new, slightly revised and freshly restored print of Wang’s film is now screening at the BAM cinema.

The unnamed courier, who actually seems to have a name on imdb and other online sources, has no idea what is in the briefcase he carries for his boss’s colleague. He doesn’t want to know, as long as it is not drugs. He is supposed to give it only to “Big Boss,” but apparently it is not important enough for the senior Triad to make time to see the Courier. As a result, he is left with too much time on his hands. His boredom leads to danger when the Courier starts hanging with Big Boss’s femme fatale mistress, Money.

Life is Cheap generated controversy when it was originally refused an “X” rating, eventually becoming one of the first films to carry an NC-17. It is hard to fathom why. Admittedly, there is a hand-chopping motifs that often recurs, but it looks cheesy compared to modern gore. Wang also captures some duck butchery that might disturb some viewers, plus it all builds towards a truly scatological punch line, but it still seems tamed compared to its reputation.

Frankly, Wang’s pseudo-documentary style, often incorporating long monologues resembling interview segments, might have been ahead of its time in 1989. Fifteen years ago, Life is Cheap might have suffered in comparison to other Jia Zhangke docu-hybrids and the like. However, in post HK “National Security” Law 2022, it feels like a sad elegy to a ruckus Hong Kong and a vibrant local culture that no longer exists. Gone are the days when the son of American immigrants from Hong Kong can return to their homeland, to film a gritty, experimental gangster movie, guerrilla-style on the city’s streets.

In fact, the film reaches true heights of elegiac lyricism when martial arts legend Lo Lieh appears in one of the docu-interludes, portraying a former pianist, who cut off his own arm rather than compromise his integrity during the Cultural Revolution. Life is Cheap might be getting a new lease on life here in America, but there is no way you could screen it in Hong Kong today.

Laotong Story: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

In today’s China, girls are an endangered species. Largely due to the government’s one-child policy, sex-specific abortions and abandonments have sky-rocketed. It was not much easier for Chinese girls during the early Nineteenth Century either. However, the Laotong (roughly translated as “Old Same”) oath of friendship helped sustain many young women. Yet, the turbulence of the time will test two women’s Laotong bond in Wayne Wang’s Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Snow Flower and Lily were born under the same sign and had their feet bound on the same day. Even though Wang waters down the literal bone-crunching reality of this practice, what the film shows is still enough to make a brawny man cringe. Unfortunately, this was considered necessary to strike a suitable marriage bargain.

Despite her family’s mean circumstances, Snow Flower’s dainty feet earn her a prestigious match. In contrast, Lily experiences the reverse social mobility, winding up betrothed to a lowly butcher after her father’s opium addiction ruins her family. Though separated by events obviously beyond their control, the two women exchange messages written within the folds of a fan, employing Nüshu, the secret script used by many Chinese women up until the Twentieth Century. (One hopes there is now an internet equivalent in widespread use today).

In parallel lives, Faye Wong Canto-pop listening high school students Nina and Sophia become a late Twentieth Century Laotong pair. Nina excels academically, while Sophia struggles emotionally in the wake of her bankrupted father’s suicide. Despite their recent estrangement, Nina puts her career on hold when a traffic accident renders Sophia comatose. As it happens, Sophia was carrying on her person a copy of her manuscript, which tells the story of Snow Flower and Lily.

Based on Lisa See’s bestselling novel, Secret Fan’s screenplay (credited to Angela Workman, Ron Bass, and Michael K. Ray), adds the contemporary story arc, allowing them to write in a part for Hugh Jackman as Arthur, Sophia’s sketchy night club impresario love interest. He even has a musical number, a novelty love song probably not designed to showcase his Broadway chops.

While Secret Fan illustrates China’s dramatic social changes, it essentially avoids political considerations. Perhaps the unsettling foot binding scene serves as an implied criticism of pre-Communistic era traditionalism. However, the go-go Shanghai of present day is essentially presented as a rather cold mercantile environment.

While the contemporary analog adds a mystical veneer to the story, Secret Fan largely aspires to high-end women’s melodrama and succeeds relatively well as such. Not surprisingly, there are few sympathetic male characters to be found in either time frame. However, the two primary leads more than hold up their ends.

Li Bingbing’s introduction to most American viewers via Secret Fan is a world away from her dynamic action turn in the forthcoming Detective Dee and the Phantom Flame, but certainly shows her range. As Nina and Snow Flower, she is quite intense and nuanced. Yet, the film’s real heart and heartstring pulling comes from Gianna Jun’s exquisitely haunting performance as Sophia and Lily.

Never shy about expressing its emotions, Secret Fan is definitely an old fashioned weeper. While the self sacrifice and noble suffering are nakedly manipulative at times, Wang deftly handles the temporal shifts and keeps the pacing rather brisk. Definitely operating in his sensitive Joy Luck Club chick flick mode, it should make several more edgy indies like Princess of Nebraska possible in the future.

A solidly respectable intergenerational drama distinguished by two very fine co-lead performances, Secret Fan is recommended to those appreciate unabashed sentimentality in film. It opens this Friday (7/15) in New York at the Angelika Film Center.

Online: Princess of Nebraska

Kids today, with their video-phones and text-messaging. Life was not so easy for their elders, which for those in China often included periods of required marching and waving around little red books. Such generational divides lie at the center of the two companion films directed by Wayne Wang, best known for The Joy Luck Club and Smoke. The first, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, a quietly elegant picture that lingers in the consciousness long after screening, is currently in theatrical release. The second, The Princess of Nebraska (trailer here, film here), is an okay film, currently available to viewers at the click of a mouse, free of charge at youtube’s Screening Room.

Princess and Prayers share similar themes, with both subtly hinting at the profound and continuing disruptions caused by the Chinese Cultural Revolution in its characters lives. However, where the characters of Prayers were mature and painfully self-aware, those of Princess are young, and rather shallow and self-absorbed, particularly the main character Sasha, but in her defense, that might be changing.

As Princess opens, Sasha arrives in the Bay Area to have an abortion. An international student in Nebraska, she was impregnated while still in China by Yang, a star in the Beijing Opera. Though we never see or hear him in the film, it quickly becomes clear how narcissistic and self-centered he must be. Evidently, bisexual as well, since it will be Boshen, his former American lover, picking up the tabs.

Sasha is young and understandably confused. After ditching Boshen at a dreary dinner party, she starts walking the seedy streets of San Francisco, in search of enlightenment, or for lack of a better idea. Eventually, she meets X, a bar hostess, whom she accompanies on a hospitality gig that approaches geisha (oiran to be more accurate) territory. Eventually, she and X wind up in bed together, as Sasha’s phone records the proceedings, presumably to be sent to Yang in hope of generating a reaction, though none is forthcoming. (The use of the videophone perspective is a frequent motif, which honestly feels clichéd by now.) After her nocturnal detour, Sasha makes her appointment at the health clinic, where she meets probably the most frank and even-handed abortion counselor in the world, Claire, a brief part memorably played by Emily Beck.

Ultimately, Princess ends on an ambiguous note. This is not Bella or even Juno (far from it). However, Sasha seems to come to the realization that her actions have consequences and moral implications, which is frankly an unusual place for a film to conclude. Ever so obliquely, this message is reinforced by the references to the Cultural Revolution, from an expat bartender, and X, as she relates her mother’s experiences in the film’s other particularly strong scene. As in Prayers, we ever so discretely see how the chaos of the past continues to influence the present. In a more macro sense, Sasha and her friends are growing up largely without an appreciation for tradition, because much of their cultural heritage was destroyed by the Cultural Revolution.

Unfortunately, there is also a lot of aimlessness in the relatively brief Princess (even at an eighty minute running time). In terms of writing and acting, Prayers is the far superior film, so it makes sense it would be the one to receive theatrical distribution and Princess would get the youtube premiere. Still, it is at times an interesting film, and Pamelyn Chee deserves attention for her performance as X. Gorgeously shot by cinematographer Richard Wong, Princess is a finely crafted film that has screened at legitimate film festivals. For free on youtube, it is certainly of an entirely different magnitude than most of the home-movies of people slandering politicians or falling off ladders that you typically find on the site.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers Starts Today

Imagine you just divorced your husband when your estranged father announces he is visiting you help straighten everything out. Oh, the joy. Such is the parental visit Yilan must endure in Wayne Wang’s quiet but emotionally heavy A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (trailer here), opening in New York today.

The fissures between Yilan and her father Mr. Shi are not just generational, but also geographic and cultural. He has traveled from mainland China, where he may just be the last surviving true-believing Communist. Conversely, Yilan has acclimated to the lifestyle of suburban (or exurban) America, now more comfortable expressing herself in English than Chinese.

Over the years a significant chasm has opened up between father and daughter, with roots in Mr. Shi’s past that Yilan never fully understood. Though ostensibly polite, she did not want him to come and withdraws further and further the longer he persists in staying. Confused by her cold response, Mr. Shi finds himself increasingly alienated in a strange country, only able to forge a human connection with Madame, a gregarious Iranian matriarch he often encounters at a nearby park.

Madame emigrated following the Iranian Revolution, to escape the repression which followed. Mr. Shi, a loyal servant in Mao’s revolution, now finds himself in America only out of a sense of familial duty. Neither has a strong command of English, yet they successfully communicate almost telepathically, using fragments of three dissimilar languages.

Something happened in the Cultural Revolution that derailed Mr. Shi’s life. Yet like an excommunicated sinner, he holds onto his love for his faith. Thousand subtly shows the continuing influence of seemingly far-removed tumultuous historical events on its characters, but not at the expense of its central family drama.

Based on a short story by Yiyun Li, featuring just four characters with significant dialogue, Thousand is uncompromisingly intimate. Yet, it never seems stagey thanks to Patrick Lindenmaier’s cinematography. Wang takes his exquisite time telling that story, but there are real emotional payoffs. Henry O is quite touching as Mr. Shi and Faye Yu gives a frankly remarkable performance as Yilan, expressing the quiet tragedies of life's bitter disappointments.

Thousand is an elegantly thoughtful film that lingers in your consciousness long after screening. It is part of a one-two punch coming from director Wang, author Li, and the distributor. While Thousand opens today at the Lincoln Plaza in New York, Princess of Nebraska (trailer here) debuts on youtube’s screening room about a month from now on October 17th. Having made the festival circuit, Nebraska has legitimate arthouse credentials, so it will be interesting to see how this distribution experiment works. As for Thousand, it might not be appreciated by those with limited attention spans, but it is an understated and rewarding film, that is definitely recommended.