| Language: Chinese Director: Hing-Ka Chan, Janet Chun Running time: Release year: 2008 |
| Cast: Stephy Tang, Janice Man, J.J. Jia, Yee Tong,Ronald Cheng, Tien You Chui, Man-kwan Lee |
Movie Review:
La Lingerie is simply a romantic-comedy done right. Yes there’s cheeseball moments, the characters can get excessively superficial and the film itself screams out blatant commercialism, but on the flip-side you have four bright actresses that are incredibly delightful and male actors that run the gamut from model-esque to pure dweebiness. With this you also have the running theme of “lingerie” and what it means to women, but fear not if you cringe at the thought of a philosophical Hong Kong commercial film. The lingerie theme is simply a prop to show Hong Kong city life filtered through a “Sex and the City” like viewpoint. However scary that sounds the guys and gals in La Lingerie will win you over by its conclusion. |
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The four girls in “La Lingerie” are Miu (Stephy Tang), Donut (Janice Man), CC (J.J. Jia), and Celine (Yee Tong). The girls are connected by their patronage of a hip Hong Kong lingerie shop.
Miu’s spinster aunt recently passes away and leaves Miu with her fully furnished apartment. She moves in with best friend Donut. These two friends are surprised to find the deceased aunt was an avid collector of lingerie.
Meanwhile, Miu is a wanna-be fashion designer and applies for a position at a top notch Hong Kong lingerie company. Unfortunately, before she can work as a designer, her boss assigns her the position of “lingerie researcher” - to better understand what lingerie means to the modern day women. A male co-worker named Lucas, notorious for hitting on younger employees, takes interest in Miu, even more so when he discovers that she is a virgin.
Donut works at the trendy lingerie shop the girls all frequent and also has a fetish for older men. She then finds herself smitten with a married pharmacist who enters her shop.
Meanwhile, Miu & Donut’s neighbor Celine is an airline stewardess. Her goal is to marry a wealthy man, but finds that she is attracted to a part time police officer.
Finally, CC works as bar hostess and encounters a naive Harvard grad who acts like none of her other customers.
With all of these parallel storylines, “La Lingerie” supplies a constant stream of cute moments that allows each of the main actresses to shine in their respective roles. Stephy Tang delivers her most engaging performance ever, while Janice Man simply makes men drool. J.J. Jia plays the character with the most depth and she does so with aplomb. She’s also the only one of the four main actresses to actually appear in lingerie. Yee Tong’s airline stewardess character was the weakest of the bunch, but her romantic interest (Tien You Chui) was able to portray his character with enough charm that you could easily overlook the weakness of Yee Tong’s character.
Storywise, Janice Man’s romance with the older pharmacist offered the most amusing moments, none more so than when she hitched up with the pharmacist’s son for revenge. You could easily argue that this sub-plot needed more screen time, as it delivered the funniest moments, but as they say sometimes in show business “leave em wanting more.”
There’s nothing deep about “La Lingerie” which is A-OK with me when it involves such a delightfully fluffy storyline. Sure you can fault the movie for running 10-15 minutes too long or the materialistic nature of all its character, but at the end of the day, you’re left with all smiles from the general likability of all the characters and the amusing moments they find themselves in. Furthermore, it felt like a breath of fresh air to watch an Asian movie not switch gears 50% into the film and morph into an entirely different type of film. “La Lingerie” knows its origins as a classic romantic-comedy and thankfully it stays there.
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