City of Desire 欲望之城

Sandra (Sandra Ng), the daughter of a prosperous businessman, returns to her native haunts after 10 years away. Her father (Lau Siu-Ming) is already old and frail, so he wants his daughter to take over the business — but Sandra doesn't know that tourism wasn't his only line of work, and that his main income came from a chain of nightclubs that are really just brothels in disguise. The Macau police take a relaxed view of such a business, but for Sandra, who was raised in Canada, this discovery comes as a genuine shock.

Impressions: Every now and then the triads, who are known to run just about the entire Hong Kong film industry, get tired of making movies about how cool it is to be a gangster, and so they make movies about how cool it is to be a prostitute. City of Desire can masquerade as a hard-hitting social drama or a crime thriller all it likes, but in reality it is a glossy, polished-to-a-shine promotional piece, actively luring to Macau not only men hungry for paid women, but also women looking for a quick buck.

In one of the film's opening scenes we see a European-looking dancer writhing around a pole and stripping off one item of clothing after another. As one of the characters informs us, such girls take home 68 US dollars a night in clean wages and around a thousand in tips, so after a couple of years they can "retire," having bought themselves a lavish villa on the beachfront. As the same character tells us, most of those who come to Macau to earn a living this way are from Croatia, Ukraine and... Russia. Sounds pretty tempting, doesn't it? Along the way, one particularly sentimental prostitute does "open our eyes" to the true state of affairs. You see, they're being strangled by exorbitant taxes, wronged by being forced to buy their costumes out of their own pockets, and generally wronged in every possible way. True, she then corrects herself – now, she says, after working for a year, I've paid off all my debts and even saved a little, proudly announcing the sum she's earned – 110 thousand dollars. Yes, those girls who weren't lucky enough to find themselves a roof in the form of some well-known nightclub do sometimes get beaten up by racketeers and clients, but there you have it – buy our elephants, the well-groomed, pampered ones from the brothels. Forgive me, but such "exposure" is nothing if not an advertising brochure.

The morality in City of Desire is in general extremely two-faced. The filmmakers introduced into the plot a priest played by Anthony Wong, who compares Macau to Sodom and Gomorrah, sighing mournfully as he looks at the cityscapes around him, but set against him is such "heavy artillery" in the shape of blooming prostitutes and happy brothel patrons that such an approach is nothing if not hypocrisy. The promotional essence of the picture juts out of every corner so obviously that from a certain point City of Desire simply ceases to be perceived as a work of art. All the more so since several subplots that the filmmakers introduced, one senses, merely "for effect," are frankly underdeveloped and only tangentially related to the main line. On the other hand, the need to draw at least some kind of conclusion in the finale led to an utterly terrible ending in every sense – senseless, stupid and as sneaky (pardon the expression) as it was possible to devise. Instead of summing up the questions concerning prostitution, the filmmakers abruptly switched to the problem of gambling, simply killing off its chief devotee (Josie Ho) in a denouement that is unconvincing and oversweetened with sentiment.

The acting in the film is so episodic that it isn't even worth mentioning. Sandra Ng, Alex Fong, Anthony Wong and Josie Ho, billed in the opening credits as the leads, spend at best about 10 minutes of screen time each – their characters are superficial and stereotypical, and so the actors don't exactly strain themselves either. Yes, by virtue of their natural charisma they come across as quite passable, but there is essentially nothing for them to act here. And there is nothing for you to watch here – you could just as well leaf through an advertising brochure for Macau's entertainment venues.