Director – Norris Wong Yee-Lam – 2019 – Hong Kong – Cert. N/C 15+ – 91m
****1/2
A Prince Edward resident starts to question whether marrying her boyfriend as the couple have long planned is really such a good idea – online in the UK as part of Focus Hong Kong 2021 Easter from Wednesday, March 31st to Tuesday, April 6th
Whatever your nationality, one of the great thrills of world cinema is when a film informs you about all sorts of aspects of a culture other than your own. That’s the case here. To call this a romantic drama is misleading because what it’s actually about is a woman on a culturally approved trajectory starting to question whether it really is something for her or whether she’d be better off finding a different life journey entirely by another route. That approved trajectory is: girl meets boy, girl moves in with boy, girl marries boy.
Perhaps there’s a second trajectory here too, suggesting that Hong Kong is a sealed, navel-gazing world caught up with looking at itself and that perhaps Hong Kongers need to get out of their homeland more, be that to mainland China to which the heroine travels for reasons of her complicated personal situation and later visits of her own volition, or be it to America, described by the film’s mainland Chinese lead as a place of freedom.
Fong (Stephy Tang – The Empty Hands, Chapman To, 2017) has moved in with Edward Yan (Hong Chu Pak) but his mother (Nina Paw Hee-ching – Beyond The Dream. 2019, Kiwi Chow, Dream Home, Pang Ho-cheung, 2010, One Nite In Mongkok, Derek Yee Tung-shing, 2004, Bullet In The Head, John Woo, 1990) doesn’t really approve and wants them to get married. Edward shares his name with the Prince Edward area of North Kowloon where this flat is and there’s talk of the owner selling it which pleases Mrs Yan as she can’t wait to buy it for her son. Likewise, she can’t wait for him to get married so she can splash out on all the trimmings.
The couple have talked about moving out and buying their own flat, but prices are prohibitive and an apartment of 1 000 square foot is considered a luxury. Hong Kongers are probably used to this idea of living in cramped apartments – once you think about it, you can see it in something like ChungKing Express (Wong Kar-wai, 1994) – but My Prince Edward expresses this idea with rare and horrific clarity of vision.
Moreover, not only is Edward a mother’s boy who has clearly never lacked for anything financially, he sublimates his mother’s domination of him into wanting to control his life partner. If Fong is out, he texts her constantly on WhatsApp asking her whereabouts. Marriage is great, a woman can enjoy belonging to a man and have all the fun and pleasure of bringing up his kids. It’s frankly hard to see why Fong should want to stay with him – maybe it relates to the confines of her world and her narrow horizons. Perhaps when all’s said and done she craves the idea of security and comfort above all else.
Yet, as she confides to her lesbian, dressmaker friend Yee (Lam Eman), she hasn’t yet informed Edward of the issue that could derail their marriage. She married a mainland Chinese through an agency as a way of making a bit of money a decade ago. Unfortunately, when she checks up the agency has screwed up the divorce so she’s still married. Fixing this on her own could take years of wading through bureaucracy.
Then her ‘husband’ Yang Shuwei (Jin Kaijie) shows up, wanting to speed up securing his Hong Kong residency permit before they divorce. This entails a number of bureaucratic hurdles, chief among which is an joint interview with mainland Chinese authorities where the ‘couple’ must explain why he/they should become permanent residents in Hong Kong. Shuwei’s plan is to get out of China altogether to go to America and he sees Hong Kong as his means of getting there.
The contrast between the highly aspirational Shuwei – who it turns out has got his girlfriend Xiaowei (Cecilia Wang) pregnant and looks increasingly likely to stick by her – and the cosseted, clinging rich boy Edward couldn’t be stronger, presenting Fong with an increasingly obvious dilemma: should she stay or should she go?
In addition to effectively articulating the Hong Kong home-owning situation, the film also explores the culture of illegal marriage with Mainlanders most effectively. Edward is not only buying into the myth, dream and institution of marriage, but also – since he runs a firm specialising in making wedding videos for prospective happy couples – actively promoting it even as he seems to lack any concept of equality within lifelong partnerships.
Although she runs a wedding dress rental business, in their verbal exchanges Yee provides Fong with a much less rose-tinted about sex, desire and relationships. And Fong’s transactions with the businesslike yet friendly Shuwei suggest to her that not all men have to treat women the way Edward does.
The film gets better and better as it goes further and deeper into its subject and by the end I had rather warmed to it in a way I really hadn’t anticipated.
My Prince Edward plays online in the UK as part of Focus Hong Kong 2021 Easter from Wednesday, March 31st to Tuesday, April 6th.
Trailer: