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Review | The Lady Improper film review: Charlene Choi discovers her sexuality in Jessey Tsang’s drama

  • The Twins star plays a gynaecology nurse with an inexplicable fear of physical intimacy who uncovers the pleasures of the flesh with a free-spirited chef
  • Tsang’s film, unlike her previous efforts, doesn’t tell the most delicate of stories, but is refreshing and gentle in its handling

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Charlene Choi in a still from The Lady Improper (category III, Cantonese), directed by Jessey Tsang and also starring Wu Kang-jen.
Edmund Lee

3/5 stars

One of Hong Kong’s most admired indie filmmakers of the past decade makes her home city commercial feature debut with The Lady Improper. The film is a refreshingly gentle, though occasionally awkward, drama about a woman’s belated sexual liberation with the help of a good man and some suggestive food-preparation sessions.

Winner of the best new director prize at the 2012 Hong Kong Film Awards, Jessey Tsang Tsui-shan is revered locally for her low-key narrative style in films such as Lovers on the Road (2008) and Big Blue Lake (2011). She does bring a touch of sensitivity to The Lady Improper’s most contrived of scenarios, albeit one that is purportedly “inspired by a true story”.

As the film begins, Yuen Siu-man (played by Charlene Choi Cheuk-yin) is a gynaecology nurse whose inexplicable fear of physical intimacy leads to her divorce. After mistakes at work, the repressed divorcee soon returns to help out at her father’s (Lau Wing) faltering restaurant.

When a Paris-educated master chef, the free-spirited Jiahao (Taiwanese actor Wu Kang-jen), is hired to take over the kitchen from her hospitalised father, Siu-man begins to learn more about her family’s once-signature recipe – as it turns out that Jiahao’s childhood memory is intricately linked to the restaurant’s glorious past.

That is, however, not all that Jiahao brings to the table. As their sweaty cooking sessions unexpectedly turn sexual, the pair must also start to contemplate the nature of their relationship. Are they lovers? What about the comely grocery storekeeper (Ashina Kwok Yik-sum) Jiahao has casual sex with? Or the dorky customer (Alex Lam Tak-shun) who asks Siu-man out?

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