SISTERHOOD is a wonderful inclusion in QUEER SCREEN FILM FEST 2017. The film is soulful and uplifting despite the pathos of the mystery at its heart. And it has superbly realised relationships to touch the heart of any woman who has had a best female friend. It was the only Macau film at the inaugural Macau International Film Festival in December 2016, where it won two awards including the “Eye of the Audience” award.
We meet Sei. In her late thirties, she runs a Taiwan Guest House with her husband, Chen. She has fallen again and her doctor is tired of treating injuries caused by her alcoholism. “Should I give up drinking?” Sei asks of her husband. “It’d do you good but I want you to be happy.” There is unresolved grief on both faces.
A public notice in the paper will lead Sei back to Macau where, 15 years ago, she applied for a job at a massage parlour. Seen in flashback with a younger cast, Sei’s past will collide with a post-handover Macau. Her story, both the exuberantly hopeful younger self and the remote, self-medicated adult, will explicate a sisterhood of four best friends.
The younger versions of the sisterhood most often refer to themselves by their masseuse numbers. With her hair dyed strawberry blonde, Gigi, (Eliz Lao) is #8 though she calls herself Double 4. She has a deep understanding of how to get men to like her and pay more. Yin Yin (Panther Chan) is #38, dead cute and knows it. With her short hair and easy laugh she is out for fun and a life to be lived. Ling (Jennifer Yu) is Sei’s mentor. She is #18 and Sie (Fish Liew) chooses #19 so they can have lockers next to each other. They will eventually room together and they are the mystery that begins with that newspaper ad.
The flashback scenes of these four women are so entertaining. One wants to be sitting at the table with them as they are laughing and eating and critiquing on their male clients. This younger cast is terrific and Fish Liew was nominated for Hong Kong Film Award for her role. They are the heartbeat of the film and each time they disappear as current events are intercut, we miss them as Sei does.
Three remain but the modern Sisterhood is very different to their younger selves. Teresa Mak as the older Double 4 and Stephanie Che as #38 are still in contact but it is a fractious and tentative relationship relying heavily on their past friendship. Older Sei is played by Gigi Leung, a very well-known Hong Kong singer, actor and activist. And she is truly enthralling on screen. Beautiful, intelligent with an inner life replete with modulated, unfulfilled and unsettling despair.
It helps that the director of the film knows how to showcase beauty in all its forms. The shots of green, open, rural Taiwan are juxtaposed with lingering shots of contemporary Macau’s architecture and hurried lifestyle. Dingy malls and tiny flats and Portuguese influenced eating houses of the old world. Shiny casinos through a high rise hotel window, overhead views of freeways and the ever-present neon signs of English brands competing with Asian lettering of the now.
Tracey Choi’s film I’M HERE won the Jury Award at the Macau Indies in 2012 and firmly established her as a filmmaker to watch. In that film, about challenges of lesbian life in modern Macau, she had to play several of the parts herself. In interviews she has made it clear that actors, even gay and lesbian actors, were not keen to sign on.
SISTERHOOD is a very different film to that thematic overtness yet the viewing experience is tinged with a longing insight into the complexity of desire.
I once lost a BFF by suggesting that there were lesbian undertones to the characters in FRIED GREEN TOMATOES. The film, not the book … you didn’t have to seek it out in the book. I was accused of diminishing female friendship and reducing something pure to sexual attraction. That was over quarter of a century ago yet the Wikipedia article on that film still describes the relationship as a ‘deep attachment’.
SISTERHOOD is deeply moving international cinema. Intimate and gentle, the storytelling is suspenseful and satisfying. But it is film to be best enjoyed with friends who understand nameless and unspoken yearnings… a perfect film for Queer Screen Film Fest, 2017.
SISTERHOOD (Cantonese with English subtitles) is playing Thursday 21 September, 6:30pm, Event Cinemas George Street.