The humble comedic beginnings of one of the titans of Taiwanese cinema…
The ageing of comedy is a tragic thing; as certain tropes and joke styles come to be more commonplace, the impact of certain comedic aspects can be lost when viewing them long after they are made. A film beloved by our parents may fall flat for us, and though this doesn’t happen all the time, it’s a shame whenever any piece of media is hindered by age.
Cute Girl is the type of film that one expects to be hit with a bad case of ageing: it’s a 1980 Taiwanese romantic comedy which draws a lot of its humour from silly visual gags. It’s likely to be remembered not for its story of the well-off Wenwen escaping to the countryside and falling in love with a land surveyor, rather than one of the nice rich boys her father has picked out for her. No, it will be viewed merely as a milestone; the first feature film from the great Hou Hsiao Hsien.
And you know what? That’s a shame. Cute Girl’s premise doesn’t promise brilliance; it would appear to be a fairly run of the mill boy meets girl, girl turns out to be of a higher social status, boy befriends girl’s fiance story. A tale as old as time, save for that last part I suppose. Despite the basic idea behind it, despite the cheesy humour (both droll and dated), despite the knowledge that Hou would progress to much grander works in his career, Cute Girl made me laugh. A lot.
Cute Girl doesn’t reinvent the comedic wheel at all, but it glances knowingly at the audience whilst performing the classics with sincerity. Occasional visual misdirection, a dash of slapstick, and a scattering of toilet humour is all that Hou needs to elicit chuckles from the audience.
The entire sequence during which the lowly civil engineer Daigang tries to make Wenwen jealous upon discovering her social status by befriending, and nearly stealing her fiance is comedy in its purest form, but also embraces a sort of anguished romance that keeps the film moving forward.
The predictability of the comedy somehow manages to work in the film’s favour, and though one can’t necessarily say the same of the romance, there is something inherently charming about the young love depicted in Cute Girl. We’ve seen it before, and the film is aware of this, so it feels no need to push the audience outside of their comfort zone.
The issue with doing this, though, is that the romance has nowhere to hide, and the central romance often doesn’t come across as terribly romantic. It’s entertaining to watch, and we hope that it succeeds out of a numbness to cliche, but beyond the adolescent ritual of carving your initials in a tree, there is little romantic spark between Wenwen and Daigang.
The only thing that saves this flaw is that there is even less of a romantic spark between Wenwen and her rich suitor, but that’s deliberate caricature, so were that not the case the film would cease to function even within its own parameters as a by-the-numbers romantic comedy.
Though it’s still a very entertaining film, it probably remains more useful to view it as a necessary step in Hou’s career, and an intriguing artefact that shows him in a more jovial setting. It sounds like a far cry from films like City of Sadness but Hou taught himself the ropes of basic filmmaking on Cute Girl, allowing him to continue to develop as both a writer and director.
I suppose what will be disappointing for many people is that you wouldn’t guess it to be a Hou film, but that’s a moot point when the concept of a ‘Hou film’ did not exist when this came out in 1980.
So Cute Girl is left in the position whereby history has given it greater weight and importance than it may have had otherwise. How many Taiwanese romantic comedies of the same era were only ever released on VHS or never made it out of Taiwan in the first place? Cute Girl is not only an entertaining footnote in the career of a great director, it’s representative of the comedy of a particular time and place. The nice thing is that it hasn’t aged, it doesn’t feel awkward to watch; sure you’ll mainly be chuckling with a sense of familiarity with the jokes, but Hou was proving even at this early stage that he was more than competent as a screenwriter.
Cute Girl is not a terribly important film, there isn’t much substance, and not everyone will enjoy it. But for what it is; a semi-sweet comedy with romantic elements, painting a vague portrait of the Taiwanese middle class in the 1980s, it gets the job done, and you won’t regret the fact that you watched it. Hou would go onto do greater things, but let’s appreciate how far he came.