With breakneck action and uproarious antics, Lau Kar Leung's "My Young Auntie" is yet another triumph in the second installment of the Heroic Grace series at UCLA.
My Young Auntie may not represent the artistic pinnacle of the martial arts film, but its exuberance made it a high point of the recently concluded “Heroic Grace: The Chinese Martial Arts Film” series at UCLA. The films ranged broadly in their styles from moving historical epic to giddy comedy to suspenseful thrillers, and brought a number of rare and interesting films, complete with guest Shannon Lee Keasler, Bruce Lee's daughter, to introduce his films.
Among this plethora of films, My Young Auntie may have had the least regard for realism. Or plot. Or consistency. The story, such as it is, involves a widow (Kara Hui) entrusted with the job of taking the deeds for the family estates to her nephew-by-marriage (Lau Kar-leung) while another nephew tries to take the property for himself. Confucian hierarchy is upended though when the widow turns out to be half the age of her nephews, and much closer in age to her grand-nephew (Xiao Hou), a westernized student. While trying to protect and hand over the documents, the auntie becomes embroiled in a battle of wills with her grand-nephew and his troublemaking student friends from Hong Kong.
Throughout the film, director Lau Kar-leung remains blissfully unconcerned with continuity. As characters wander from scene to scene they can go from traditional courtyards to busy modern streets to surreal dance halls that look like they were cobbled together with leftover set pieces from Dark Shadows. The costuming too looks like somebody ran through the leftovers of a dozen different films from Chinese historical epics to Elvis vehicles. The pièce de résistance is a costume ball where leads Hui and Xiao show up as “Juliet” (via Marie Antoinette) and Robin Hood (via your grandmother's closet) respectively, to be faced with not one but two sets of Three Musketeers in a dance-cum-free-for-all fight. Swords slash and blonde curly wigs fly in the high-spirited melee, and the sense of fun is palpable. Later, an attack on the family compound is lead by Hui dressed like a heroine in a wuxia novel and Xiao having geared up as an extra from Patton. Instead of distracting the viewer though, these inconsistencies take on a charm of their own. Without any pretense at authenticity, My Young Auntie allows audiences to sit back and enjoy the mania of a romp without regarding reality.
Much of the credit for the film should also go to the enchanting lead. Kara Hui owns every scene she's in, with athleticism and power in her fight scenes and a winsome ability to portray the young auntie in myriad situations. Indeed, the character of the aunt required significant range and skill to portray, despite the goofiness of the film overall. The aunt is a powerful martial artist, a serene matriarch with a firm command over the family despite her youth, and a young woman from the countryside with little experience or understanding of modern life who feels suddenly confined by her senior role. Hui not only manages to make all of these disparate aspects seem part of the same character, but makes the aunt one of the most interesting and well-rounded characters in any of the martial arts films. Within the same film audiences can be awed by her fighting, impressed with her maturity, amused by her country bumpkin mistakes, and sympathetic with her plight as a young woman prematurely trapped in the responsibilities of an old woman. While the other actors never quite manage to light up the screen like Hui, Xiao does a good job of making the grand-nephew obnoxious, arrogant, annoying, and yet funny and adorable, while Lau does a good turn as the slightly confused good nephew. Perhaps the greatest shame of the movie is that Lau, not Hui, gets the penultimate fight scene, but there is still more than enough action and humor in the rest of the movie to forgive this one small lapse. Just sit back and enjoy the inane, madcap spectacle of it all.