The 25th annual New York Asian Film Festival takes place from July 10th to July 26th. For details and showtimes, click here.
Make no mistake: Bird of Paradise is a sitcom movie. But that’s not so much a dismissal as a statement of fact. Another fact? People happen to like sitcoms. Especially when they give you likeable characters you enjoy spending time with. So while there’s precous little here that you won’t see coming from a mile away, that might not be the issue you’d expect it to be.
Our story revolves around Mei Yuen (Catherine Chen), a 46-yearold housewife with 20 years of marraige under her belt, with all the inertia that implies. We first meet her having perpared the scheduled breakfast for the men in her life: husband Ming Lam (Peter Chan) and gawky son Hang (Jayden Cheung), and we can immediately see the dynamic at play here. The underappreciated backbone that keeps the household running, at the cost of her own autonomy and sense of self.
Ming Lam proves very quickly to be every inch the martinet at his work as a teacher at Hang’s school; if anything, he’s even more rigid and humorless, ruling over his fiefdom with the haughty inflexibility of the bone deep control freak. Which makes the antics of rebellous student Shan (Yeung Nga Man) particularly anathema to him.; her open, cheeky defiance of his authority drives him up the wall… and proves catnipto the deelpy smitten Hang.
Mei Yuen, of course, lives miles away from all that, constrained as she is to the kitchen and the laundry room. But a fleeting encounter with an old schoolmate on a rare social excursion sends her on a new path. A path that involves platform heels and no end of bruised inner thighs.
That’s right: this is a movie about getting your groove back via the gentle art of pole dancing.
Frankly, dear reader, I’m starting to think it’s a Me problem: I’v watched four movies for the Festival so far and not a single one has been the film I was expecting from the plot summary. Sometimes that sort of thing is a blessing and sometimes it’s a curse. Here, I would say it’s closer to blessing than curse; it’s entirely possible I would have liked a sexier or more irreverent version of this story. But sometimes the more interesting path is the one where you walk out of a movie about pole dancing and think ‘You could actually watch that as a family and I think it’d mostly be fine’. And in a healthy world cinema ecosystem we really ought to have at least one of those every once in a while, don’t you think?
Of course, a premise like this pretty much rests entirely on the shoulders of its chosen star, so its to the films great advantage that they’ve got Catherine Chau at their disposal. From her very first moment she has the audience on her side, and while the film is obviously going to be tilted in her favor both her subdued frustration, hesitation and slow boiling reactivation of her sense of self and awarenes of the power inherent in her acceptance of her own body makes for a fairly riveting journey. Because this isn’t the story of somebody learning she’s secretly been a dynamo at the pole just waiting to be unleashed. While she of course steadily improves over the course of the film, she never exactly gets great at her craft. But that wasn’t ever the point, and the script by writer-director Joey Wu underlines this in ways both big and small.
To that end, one of the most integral things Wu does as a filmaker is in the way she chooses to shoot those dance sequences. There’s a way to shoot and edit these things, and it’s a fairly obvious way, which we could call ‘driven by a certain eroticism’. And it’s not that that couldn’t also be good, in its way. It would just be the most obvious– the most predictable– way of going about it.
What Wu does instead, is showcase the sheer physicality of these acts, and seeking out the beauty in the very effort of it. Mei Yuen doesn’t get her groove back because her moderate ability to master some of the moves that come easily to the rest of the class makes her desirable to others. She gets her groove back because she pushes herself to realize what she’s phsycialy capable of, and it’s more than she ever even imagined.
It’s not the way these sorts of story usually get told, and it’s refreshing to watch unfold. And, happily, isn’t the only way Bird of Paradise carves its own path. So to close, a few words on the “villain” of the piece.
Of course, there isn’t really a villain of the piece; it’s not actually that kind of movie. But to the extent we need to put a face on an antagonist, the husband is always a god use case for that sort of thing. From the very outset of the movie we have a pretty god idea that this stodgy, obstinate man who takes his wife for granted is going to see the light by the times the end credits roll. He’s an annoying, somewhat absurd character, with his Type A dietary demands and constantly playing Elmer Fudd to Shan’s ‘Bugs Bunny as HS3 girl’ antics… but I keep coming back to small, basically unnecessary moment early on in the film.
Ming Lam returns late to find dinner in the fridge and a loving note from Mei Yuen. Mistakenly thinking she has fallen asleep on the couch waiting up for him, he smiles at her with unmistakable love and affection, a scene witnessed by no one but the audience.
It’s a small thing, but do me a favor: think of all the films with this archetypal character you’ve seen in your life. How many times were they afforded a moment like that? A moment where whatever their flaws, whatever shitty things they say or do later in the film, they are allowed a moment of genuine, unprompted and unacknowledged sentiment?
That the person on the couch turns out to be his mother-in-law (Elaine Jin, really leaning into the randy, adventurous grandma archetype), who recoils when he lovingly tries to wake up his wife and take her to bed is, perhaps, an inevitable bit of busines. But sometimes you gotta take the hacky with the good in this life.
There are quibbles one could make when it comes to Bird of Paradise. The logistics that keep Shan from clocking Mei Yuen feel like they ought to have unraveled long before they actually do. And while it’s never less than a pleasant, affable experience, it’s hard not to wish the laugh went just a little bit harder. But in a larger sense it does seem kind of churlish to complain. It may not be perfect, but sometimes perfect would be missing the point.
