AB-NORMAL BEAUTY (2004)

Race Wong plays a lauded student photographer named Jin, who turns her back on the accolades and even her concerned girlfriend Jas (Roseanne Wong) to pursue more morbid and grotesque subjects like suicide jumpers and dead animals. But then she starts receiving videotapes featuring truly sick images of a girl being murdered, presumably real, and presumably for Jin’s benefit. Naturally, Jin starts to lose her mind. Anson Leung turns up as a nice but dim fellow student who has an obsession with Jin, much to Jas’s annoyance.
Sounds fascinating right? Yes, it does. Unfortunately, it isn’t. It’s not just the fact that the film features a lesbian couple as lead characters and yet doesn’t feature any sex between them, but that’s certainly a big part and worth discussing. The film starts slowly, you would presume so it could flesh out this relationship, or it would at least give us some gratuitous sex in the meantime. But no, the film isn’t interested in that. Aside from a couple of lines, you’d have to watch the DVD bonus material to even find out that the two were a lesbian couple. Oh, and the fact that the two actresses are actually real-life sisters doesn’t matter a damn. The bond between the two characters is vital, get other actresses or remove the lesbian angle altogether if you can’t give us at least the most basic representation of that bond (i.e. Sex). I mean, who the hell casts sisters as a lesbian couple anyway? (Cruel Intentions 2 doesn’t count!).

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be interested in much else either. It takes forever to get going, giving us scene after scene of Jin taking photos or developing them in the dark room. Wow, how fun! The thing is, as the film progresses, one finds that the early passages are the best thing in the film. This is because, for the most part, the film is truly gorgeous to look at (say, around ¾ of the film). The colour scheme is fabulous (mixing bright colours with drab greys), and though the story is dull, at least you can soak in the wonderful imagery. The occasional moment of female nudity was also aesthetically pleasing too, I must say.

However, when the film does get to its main point, it degenerates into an all too familiar scenario (with a touch of David Lynch and perhaps Dee Snider’s Strangeland), especially in terms of visuals which get progressively less interesting, as does the story. If something more interesting preceded it, I might be forgiving, but the first half is only marginally better (unless you enjoy themes of child abuse) than the latter stages.
If you like the current crop of Asian horror films (I don’t), you’re probably going to dig this a lot more than me, so in my score I shall keep that in mind. It’s not my thing (I wasn’t keen on the child abuse angle, for starters and it’s really no different from the overrated modern Japanese horror oeuvre).

The DVD comes with a short but interesting behind the scenes doco with the filmmaker and the two leads (with some minor contributions by Leung), the latter two being absolutely lovely as they talk about their experiences on the film. It’s almost worth purchasing the DVD just to hear one of the naïve girls remark; "I realised homosexuals are very attentive". Uh-huh. Some deleted scenes are also featured, and as per usual, add absolutely nothing at all to the film.