Tong ju guan xi (1993)

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Director:

Roman Cheung

Cast

Kent Cheng
Anita Lee
David Wu

Also Known As:

Cohabitation

Country:

Hong Kong

Color:

Color

They May Associate, But Not Easily Cohabit.

A romantic comedy drama that provides a good deal of erotic activity, featuring four popular Hong Kong players, should have been granted a reasonable chance at success, but this production, although lively enough upon occasion, is cliché-strewn throughout and it is apparent that a tyro director has not quite determined upon exactly which sort of narrative he wishes to develop. Paul (Kenneth Chan), having recently moved to Hong Kong from Macau, has opened a hairdressing salon whereat he employs his closest friend Alex (David Ng), and the two men begin romantic relationships with customers, Paul with Ann (Anita Lee), while Alex becomes attached to Eliza (Jacqueline Law); however, their blithe love stories soon assume second place to dark secrets that the women have been keeping from their new lovers and this leads to problems for all four. Despite an ongoing housing shortage within the Hong Kong region, it is still considered by many to be rather less than conventional, indeed actually bad form, when members of the opposing sex cohabit a residence without auspices of marriage, but Paul and Alex, enlivened from their fresh amourous connections, are eager to test boundaries of accepted taste, and while wrestling against expected obstructions from such as jealousy and misunderstandings, the two men persist in pursuing the women. Director Cheung seemingly is trying overmany tacks, resulting in the film's having an uncertain tone, ranging from giddy comedy, through scenes of awkwardly composed soft core frolicking, to elemental soap opera and back again, with only dedicated effort by the principals able to produce intermittently focused sequences for the interest of viewers. Law wins acting honours due to her wide range of performing skills, in spite of having to deal with often stilted dialogue in addition to unpersuasive direction, the latter not aided by choppy editing. Released upon DVD in letterbox format, the film offers top-flight visual and sound quality, its original dialogue being in Cantonese, with a substantial amount of English. Dubbing into Mandarin is not synched well but all subtitles are satisfactory. The IMDb page for the film unaccountably lists Kent Cheng as a cast member.