Fridae

Unlike Hollywood, Hong Kong is not rife with dynasties of film actors and directors. Right now, the people who can lay claim to this honour can be counted with one hand. There’s Nicholas Tse and Jaycee Chan, but Kenneth Bi has the best pedigree of the lot – he’s a Sundance featured director, for one thing. Bi’s career as director has been nothing short of impressive – witness the natural empathy his films have for subjects like LGBT people in Rice Rhapsody and troubled teens in The Drummer. But what should we make out of Bi’s latest, a flick about compensated dating and teenage prostitution in Hong Kong?

I’d like to say how tough it is to make a film about teenage prostitution. It could be easy if you just want to draw in audiences with lurid sensationalism, but we’re talking about a director who shied away as much as he could from smug, patronising depictions of troubled teens in a teen/sports drama, and LGBT people in a food/cooking comedy.

Bi’s approach here to the difficult subject in Girl$ is a largely respectful one. He does not run away from the fact that this is the sex industry (and as the film’s rating suggests, there are explicit sex scenes); what is presented is a phenomenological, almost stream of consciousness experience of a month in the lives of four teenage girls. There’s no sugar-coating or misguided liberal valourisation of what they do; nor is there a knee-jerk and judgemental gaze that the audience looks through.

Does Girl$ entertain? It appears that Kenneth Bi might have thought that presenting the rich, immediate life-world of his characters just wasn’t enough. There is an attempt to spice up the script with a subplot about a serial killer preying on teenage sex workers, as well as by introducing elements of IM and the internet. One of them works very well while the other... you won’t know why the director bothered.

At any rate, Girl$ is far more watchable than I expected. My only grouse is that the stilted Mandarin dubbing literally robbed the film of its rich Cantonese street slang.