Isabella

Year:2006
Director:Pang Ho-Cheung
Cast:Chapman To Man-Chat, Isabella Leong, Meme Tian, JJ Jia, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Derek Tsang Kwok-Cheung, Shawn Yue, Steven Cheung Chi-Hung, Josie Ho Chiu-Yi, Jim Chim Sui-Man, Wan Yeung-Ming
Description:
It's
not the Eighth Wonder of the World, but Isabella Leong
can act. EEG naysayers may have to bite their
tongues this time, because Leong, star of the heinous
2005 comedy Bug Me Not, shows here that she's
more than just another empty Hong Kong popstar. The
leggy ingenue is compelling and genuinely impressive
in director Edmond Pang's Isabella, which surprisingly
does not refer to his photogenic leading lady. Instead,
the title Isabella refers to a dog owned by
Cheung Bik-Yan , who's been locked
out of her Macau flat with furry Isabella left alone
inside. The need to get back inside her flat leads
Yan to Shing , a corrupt cop who she sleeps
with during a drunken one-night stand. After their
tryst, Yan shadows Shing until she hits him up for
the rent money. She also drops this whopper on him:
she's his daughter. Yay, incest!
The backstory to this
socially frowned-upon pairing: many moons ago, Shing
loved and left Yan's mom , who gave birth
to and raised Yan without Shing's knowledge. Yan's
mom also recently passed away, leaving Yan without
guidance or enough money to placate the obnoxious
landlord . Shing isn't too keen on having Yan hang around
him at first, but eventually he gives in, helping
her look for Isabella, as well as simply spending
time with her. So begins an odd, and even touching
father-daughter romance, punctuated less by actual
events than by mood, minor shifts in emotion, and
a glorious, romanticized look at Macau. Basically,
we watch as Yan becomes a part of Shing's life, first
as an annoyance, then as an accepted relative, and
finally as a cherished daughter. There are some actual
events and even surprises along the way, but most
of Isabella can be summed up in mood. It starts,
it progresses, and then it ends. Along the way, there's
laughs, tears, and many glimpses of Isabella Leong's
bare legs and Chapman To's bare torso. Despite that
latter detail, this is a film worth seeing.
Edmond Pang has never
been the most friendly of directors. His previous
films have seemingly been more concerned with snarky
intelligence than earnest emotions. That changes for
Isabella. Instead of a film that plays with
audience expectation and puts plot
above character, Isabella is seemingly all
about the people. Pang
puts almost exclusive focus on his father-daughter
couple, and wrings exceptional performances from his
two actors. Chapman To has long since proven that
he's more than an annoying sidekick, and Isabella gives him ample opportunity to display his range.
Shing's growing maturity is felt not only in To's
performance, but in the background plot involving
police corruption in Macau. Shing is the fall guy
for a corruption probe, and has plans on how to deal
with his possible fall from grace. Yan is his inadvertent
savior, and Isabella Leong gives her precocious charm
and a lovable impish rebelliousness. The relationship
that develops between the two is compelling in its
slow, modest development and reliance on incidental
rather than overt emotions.
Not that Edmond Pang
is unseen in Isabella. On the contrary, the
director puts his filmmaking fingerprints all over
the film - though at first he seems to be aping Wong
Kar-Wai in his use of moody images and evocative close-ups.
All that changes a good five minutes into the film,
when his clever sense of humor begins to appear. Sooner
or later, other Pang signifiers show up, including
showy star cameos , absurd extraneous
dialogue, and questionably relevant plot detail. Pang
takes great pains to set Isabella during the
waning days of Macau's colonial status, and includes
numerous intertitles detailing police corruption prior
to the 1999 handover from Portugal to China. He also
serves up other juicy details, such as parallels between
Yan and her dog Isabella, Shing and his daughter Yan,
China and Macau, Portugal and Macau, and probably
even Initial D co-stars Anthony Wong and Chapman
To in some lost deleted scene. The fact that Pang
even named his film Isabella should factor
in somewhere too. Pang's sense of humor occasionally
seems more self-serving than necessary to his films.
After AV, suspecting Pang of loading his films
just to manufacture meaning isn't completely out of
the question.
Also somewhat manufactured
is Pang's artful storytelling, which seems to telegraph
its intentions with every beautiful shot or meticulously
staged scene. Pang changes up his directorial style
for Isabella, and he gets great results. Isabella
works wonders with mood and performance, and Pang
frames his subjects with effective filmmaking technique.
But Pang's aims are frequently obvious; each scene
seems programmed to accomplish certain goals, and
Pang technique almost always favors mood over narrative
surprise. There's never a sense in Isabella that you're discovering anything; instead, Pang shows
it to you in as obviously artful a manner as he can
muster. The result is that the film doesn't seem to
be doing very much. It tells a story, and his characters
experience a complete journey, but the emotions felt
seem calculated in every single choice Pang makes. Isabella is artful and undeniably gorgeous,
but it also feels very, very planned.
But hey, it works! Pang
may go obvious arthouse-lite in his filmmaking choices,
but the choices he makes always seem to be the right
ones, plus he doesn't sacrifice his intelligence or
wit to do it. Isabella is frequently funny
and touching, and Pang gets smart, involving performances
from his actors. Pang also gets the most out of his
production; the mood he creates is an exceptionally
seductive one. Macau is rendered as romanticized and
otherworldly, the characters feel real and complete,
and Peter Kam's evocative score provides pitch-perfect
support. As a filmmaker, Edmond Pang is probably not
yet fully mature, as his technique still betrays a
certain showy obviousness. Still, Pang's storytelling
is remarkably assured, plus he's smart enough to downplay
any massive significance, settling instead for emotions
and feelings that seem appropriate for his characters
and their situations. Pang also has an uncanny knack
for getting the best from his actors, be they Chapman
To, Daniel Wu, Gillian Chung, Lawrence Chou, or - perhaps most notably - Isabella Leong. With Isabella,
Leong impresses enough that calling her Hong Kong's
most promising young female star is not a stretch
at all - plus it almost makes us forget that she
appeared in Bug Me Not. For that, we must give
Edmond Pang our sincerest thanks.