A first love between two best friends leaves both lost when they go their separate ways…
Wing Lee and Sylvia Lee are two best friends in secondary (senior high) school in Hong Kong, sharing everything together. Wing is the monitress of her year, a very strict student. But with Sylvia, she lets her hair down and is easy-going. One day, after Sylvia embarrasses Wing with her teacher, she intimates that she likes Wing. This triggers a runaway reaction in Wing who tries to dismiss it due to her closeness to Sylvia but after a while, she falls in love with her. The two girls are besotted with each other but a fissure in their relationship occurs when the school authorities become aware of their love for each other. A schism happens and the two girls go their separate ways only to come back together again when Sylvia contacts Wing to ask her to be her maid of honour at her marriage ceremony.
The film by Chiu Hoi Yeung (When Heaven Burns, Turning Point) and Candy Ng Wing-shan has some good points and some bad points but I’ll address both at the same time. Hedwig Tam (Wing) and Renci Yeung (Sylvia) are fine actors, navigating the turbulence of adolescence, adding nuance to a very delicate story. As they mature in age throughout the film, we see them react to different things in their relationship and when they depart from each other, their outlooks change as they meet new people. But it’s the way in which their earlier relationship dominated their feelings that determines how they change as people. As adults, I liked them but every time we jump between the past and the present, I felt a disconnect between the performances, almost as if they were played by four people instead of two. Normally, that would be a good thing but here, because the film takes place in two time periods, it’s as if it feels wrong for them to be playing grownups in one period and teenagers in another.
On the other hand, the intensity of their relationship, especially when they push back against the school’s attempts to break them up, is something precious and the quiet moments between the girls is so good, full of looks and lines that are whispered in the places they can be alone. It’s a film where less is more but like a run through a colourful meadow, there are moments when the girls break free of their constraints. It’s the little things like that which make the film better than the average romantic film. It’s interesting to see how the director plays around with scenes broken up over time and how we see one scene with the girls, then a while later we see a bit of the scene but with a very important line said while one of the girls is asleep by the other. I feel these are more important than the very dramatic scenes that the cast and crew have obviously put a lot of work into. They just feel more organic and delicate.
Also, I loved that Wing and Sylvia’s parents are completely blasé, almost undisturbed, about the girls relationship and instead, it is the school that becomes the villain of the story, humiliating the girls into renouncing their relationship, to disasterous results for the girls, especially Sylvia. That the school has a decidedly Catholic outlook is either deliberate or the filmmakers didn’t think much into it.
Adolescents live on their emotions, it’s a part of how they mature into adults, and as Sylvia and Wing’s love burns brightly, it also burns out quickly. Replacing it is a melancholy that seeps into Wing’s life. She tries to sleep with a boy in college but immediately regrets it. Every time, she comes back to Sylvia and how she made her feel. As for Sylvia, she soldiers on but it feels like being with Wing after the passion of their earlier time together is too hurtful for her. I found Renci Yeung worked better as the film shows her evolution away from Tam’s Wing. The film reaches two endings, one for Wing and another for she and Sylvia. I noticed that as Wing narrates the film, it becomes her story about she and Sylvia rather than the story of she and Sylvia. This means that a lot of what we know, or think we know, about Sylvia is constructed by Wing. Wing is not an unreliable narrator but her view of her time with Sylvia makes her memories tainted by recrimination and rancor.
I like that we don’t know for the film’s runtime if she will get a resolution to her burning question about how Sylvia felt about her back then. Ultimately, the film is about a first love and everything that goes into such a time. The film manages to capture how a person can be swept up in that feeling at the time and how desperate they can be to find out whether the other person felt the same. For this reason, I can’t completely dismiss the film and its shortcomings to the bin. It’s a tough thing to capture and by accident or design, it pulls it off.