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Capsule Reviews

The Mistress    (1999)
Crystal Kwok's first movie, inspired by a true story, deals with the adventures of a young woman.

If this love affair isn't very original, the force of Crystal Kwok direction was to tell the story with a new style and a refreshing tone. Indeed Kwok multiplied cinematographic processes, but surely didn't make a melting pot of effects, so current in Hong-Kong productions. She intended actually to illustrate systematically what she was saying, and to use the camera to serve her speech right. Hence the moving camera-works when the young women do some shopping. Shots lose their reality: filters are used when showing Alex phantasms, or some scenes become a dream when a woman wandering in a misty forest illustrates the female psyche. Shots are static and slower in the depiction of melancholic moments. The music score is extremely varied as well, from jazz to Canto pop, passing by classical music. This variety of styles doesn't imply, however, a lack of coherence. The multiplicity of styles has even the capability to surprise the audience and maintains his interest. On top of that, The Mistress passes from laughter to tears, from lightness to gravity, from decency to vulgarity. This well-mastered freedom of tone makes the film unique.

These qualities go along with an original subtext for a Hong-Kong movie. It can easily face any European productions, where love affairs are one of the favourite subjects. Crystal Kwok has entirely directed The Mistress from a female point of view. She avoids then any moralistic approach and she depicts, therefore, an intriguing, exciting, but also an unsatisfactory experiment. Kwok avoids any simplification by preserving this ambivalence. If men are mediocre, women are, however, not shown like victims persecuted by them (Alex boyfriend is dull and Henry is egoistic). Director Kwok insists on the importance of the realm of fancy in love for a woman, the importance of imagination that quickly makes her forget all realities. Prisoner of a love feeling, Alex, refuses her role of mistress assigned by Henry. She loses control of the situation and she can only find a way out by stopping her love for him.

Two beautiful sequences show perfectly well this tragic dimension of the woman. The first one takes place during a modern painting exhibition. This is the first time Alex and Henry meet, and it is merely a date between friends. Alex admits that she doesn't understand contemporary art, whilst the camera stops on an abstract painting. The meaning of this scene changes at the end of film. Painting is then presented like a metaphor of love. Alex lack of understanding announced already her failure, her incapacity to understand that she would be overwhelmed by her love for Henry, by her role as a mistress. The punishment is terrible because Henry eventually leaves her without regret and she has to overcome her disappointment alone.
The second key sequence is probably when three women of Henry (his two mistresses and his wife) sing the final sentimental song. This is a wonderful metaphor to indicate this need for a woman to nourish herself with a representation of love based on a naive romanticism, an idealised love.

Is it the right solution then to have a cynical and feeling-less behaviour toward men? Some women surely would make this choice. Most of them remain captive of this way of viewing love. It is what seems to think director Crystal Kwok.

Freely translated by Thomas, September 2002.
Laurent Henry 4/30/2000 - top

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