Three Husbands

Film description

In the last part of his „prostitution trilogy” Fruit Chan drifts further towards fairy-tale narration full of visual metaphors which stimulate imagination and bitter satire of Hong Kong reality. Mui lives with an older man, Second Brother, on a boat moored off the coast of Hong Kong. The main source of their income is main character's prostitution, yet for Mui sex is more a matter of unfulfilled lust and irresistible biological need than simply one of the means to make money. One day she draws the attention of one of her clients - a shy underdog nicknamed Four Eyes. He bribes Second Brother to marry Mui, but living on land in a cramped social housing makes her unhappy. After all, she turns out to be a truly unique woman; her mysterious origin will push Mui and her three partners to search for the most intricate ways of sexual satisfaction. Suffice to say that Mui can do more with a papaya than Lee Kang-sheng’s character with a watermelon in Tsai Ming-liang’s “The Wayward Cloud”.

In "Three Husbands" the director once again reveals the lesser-known face of Hong Kong. Instead of skyscrapers and streets full of neon lights, the plot is set against a backdrop of junkyards on a quayside, run-down fishing villages and numerous bays, where the main characters' boat lazily floats. Fruit Chan refers to the oldest Hong Kong legends about the people from Lantau Island to sketch an imaginary tale about fierce capitalism and consumerism, which have grown into the tissue of Hong Kong inhabitants’ bodies and are becoming a cause of the city’s gradual downfall. The visual style harmonizes perfectly with the plot, drawing an extremely naturalistic and organic picture of a world that is long remembered. In Fruit Chan's perspective, the Fragrant Harbour irreversibly begins to smell of decay, and Hong Kong itself is slowly becoming a deserted city of disappointment.

Maja Korbecka