You know, pirates have never
appealed to me on a cinematic level as much as they should. I mean, their tales include, to use the cliché,
“high adventure” on the high seas, and they usually look great. They have grizzled, swarthy men doing manly
things (with just a whiff [sometimes more] of homoeroticism). They have pillaging of villages and molesting
of maidens. But they’ve simply never
done it for me completely. I’ve enjoyed
some, to be sure, like Captain Blood and
the underseen Nate and Hayes (hell, I
even dug The Pirates of Penzance for
a hot second back in the day), and the Ray
Harryhausen Sinbad films are some
of my favorite fantasy films of all time (though, let’s be honest, that’s way
more for the stop motion monsters than for any piratical hijinks [which Sinbad
didn’t really get into anyway]). Nevertheless, the mere conceit of pirates in a
movie never piques my interest beyond a halfhearted “okay, then.” This even extends to the wildly broad,
threadbare pirates of Ulysses Au-Yeung
Jun’s (aka Yang Ming Tsai) The Country of Beauties (aka Island Warriors aka Warrior Women aka Yang Yang
Jun). They’re filthy and skanky, and
their captain (Cheng Fu-Hung) is a
flamboyantly adorned (his “crown” resembles nothing so much as a glorified hat from
The Flintstones’ Loyal Order of Water
Buffalo) malcontent, so all the bases are covered. And they still didn’t distinguish themselves
for me overmuch.
Years ago, a “lascivious” tribal
king exiled his wife to a remote island (read: Taiwan), where future
generations of women became “Amazons” and formed a She-Woman Man Haters’ Club
all their own. The women spend their
time fending off pirate attacks, disowning the inhabitants of the nearby Men’s
Island (yes, it actually has that uninspired name), and doing gymnastics and
wicked dance moves en masse to a poppy, little rock number. When three idiots show up intent on stealing
the legendary treasure of the Amazons (for the sake of argument, I’ll just
refer to them as such from here on out, even though they’re not literally
Amazons in the mythological sense), a monkey wrench is thrown into the
not-so-delicate balance of the distaff society.
The
Country of Beauties is an odd duck of a film in more ways than one, and I
think this is largely due to its tone.
On the one hand, the film is about women who hate men so much, they set
any male infants born there adrift in the sea to be eaten by sharks or drowned,
and they ritually castrate men who either trespass on their island and/or fail
to produce female offspring. On the
other hand, their entire existence is due to some asshole male who booted his
wife to an island (assumedly so he could wet his wick with other women
unfettered). The pirates regularly lay
siege to the island and make off with some ladies. The Amazons have a right to not like men; all
of their headaches were caused by men. The
film takes this angle very seriously, but it does so to the point of
condescension, because the filmmakers treat the women as completely wrongheaded
in their ideology.
This patronization mainly takes
the form of the denizens of Men’s Island.
The men’s chief, Wan, sends envoy Lu (Don Wong Tao), along with the corpse of one of their citizens (for
emphasis), to beseech Queen Nadanwa (Elsa
Yang Hui-Shan) to “change your female chauvinist system” and calls the
Amazons “barbarians” (way to win hearts and minds, man). Wan himself admonishes Nadanwa that “women
can’t live in harmony without men,” and “everyone should live happily
together.” It’s not until the men
actually show that they’re willing to help the women that any of this is acknowledged. The women are presented as wrong, pure and
simple. Naturally, then, one of the
princesses, Chung (Fanny Fong Fong-Fong),
falls for one of the men and violates the Amazons’ rules in order to be with
him. Chung is willing to go to the point
of self-injury to prove her point, but her chosen beau uses the opportunity to further
browbeat the Queen and her people. Moreover,
an Amazon uses up all of her “Virgin Kung Fu” energies to save the life of a
man. Afterwards, they make out, and she
turns into the old hag she actually is (she’s over a hundred years old, her
youth and power maintained by her chastity), but she states that she regrets
nothing. For a film which is ostensibly
about female empowerment, it’s actually a vehicle for male dominance (you
could, I suppose, argue that it’s a call for the harmony embodied by the yin
and yang principle, but I just didn’t get that vibe).
For as po-faced as the film is
about its theme, it also has some prominently unsubtle humor that not only
doesn’t work due to its vapidity (which is standard in many Chinese genre
films) but also turns on a dime back to the rather grim, self-serious approach
of the rest of the picture. For example,
a tubby pirate lands on top of an Amazon, impressing her into the sand on the
beach like one of King Kong’s paw prints.
Later, he is killed in a manner most bloody and without a hint of the
drollness displayed earlier. Primarily,
however, this odd dichotomy is exemplified by the three treasure hunters. They inveigle their way into not being
castrated by stating that they are, by turns, a doctor who can cure any
ailment, an expert cannon builder, and a schlub whose sole claim to fame is
having fathered thirty-six children. The
doctor handles a difficult childbirth by accidentally jumping on the mother’s
stomach. The cannon builder digs his
heels in about not wanting to be used as a stud. But the profligate guy, Dahai (Hui Bat-Liu), is the real
exemplar. He mugs and gurns in the most
ham-handed manner possible. When he’s
taken to impregnate a couple of Amazons, they turn out to be not only kind of
hideous but also biters. Later, he is
castrated for trying to get with a lesbian princess, and he immediately turns
into a swishy queen. Regardless, he
falls into despair over this, and he plans to take revenge or die trying. The admixture of idiocy and sobriety sits
uneasily, and in combination with the disdainful air aimed at the Amazons, The Country of Beauties produces
conflicting viewpoints, not in the sense of sparking honest discussion but
rather in the sense of wanting to be a fun, exploitative romp while also
wanting to be a snotty reprimand to all the world’s uppity women. You want to like it. There are elements of it to like. But its waters are just a little too muddy to
want to go swimming in them for any extended period of time.
MVT: The outlandish designs,
from the unlikely costuming of the Amazons to the giant, naked,
cannonball-firing (from its eyes, not from where you would at first assume)
statue of the Amazons’ founding mother are just great.
Make or Break: The very
opening of the film, with its dancing, cheerleading, and gymnastics truly drew
me into the moment, although it belies where the film will go rather swiftly.
Score: 6.5/10
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