Ah Kam

The film tries too hard. It tries to be a behind the scenes look at Hong Kong action film making. And a thriller. And a love story. It also intends to give Michelle Yeoh a chance to play three very different aspects of the same woman. The film spends not enough time on the first theme and too much on the others.

That said, it is an extremely effective little film And more important: it gives Michelle Yeoh the chance to do some of the best acting of her career. She creates a wonderfully complete and charming character as a stunt double getting her big break.

The woman she plays is, especially in the first third, different from anything you have seen her do before. It proves that she is one of the greatest living actresses -- and not just in action films.

Before the film I was watching the actors list. It seemed impressive with the names Michelle Yeoh and the legendary Sammo Hung. I immediately thought of kung fu fights and action. This is not what the film delivered even if the title suggests it. It's mostly a drama revolving around Yeoh's character Ah Kam. Ah Kam is an ordinary woman trying to get by, having success at some things and bad luck with others, just your typical basic drama plot with some twists thrown in. It starts nicely with scenes on an action movie set where they are shooting the stunts. After that it's downhill and towards the end it gets very jumpy, with weird scenes out of nowhere. I found it very difficult to follow the plot because the scenes felt somehow out of place and inconsistent. So what to expect of this film is Michelle Yeoh and Sammo Hung without the great action sequences you are used to seeing when associated with these names. The film delivers only a couple of average action scenes, but not enough to satisfy the people watching this for the action. Plus the end is totally mixed up and unsatisfactory. Even if I watched this without my "action glasses" as a drama, which it is, I wouldn't find it very good and I like a good drama film every now and then.

Stunt woman Michelle Yeoh finally gets her break in the hardscrabble world of Hong Kong film, when director Sammo Hung's leading lady throws a fit. No, she doesn't get to play the lead, she gets to be a stunt woman on the production, and discovers an unlikely and erratic collection of people who produce the most amazing effects in the sloppiest and most haphazard fashion possible.

Ann Hui's is bolstered by these two performers, as well as the other performers. Like many a Hong Kong production, it has a third act that seems to come out of nowhere to seal the emotional arc of the story, but I'm fine with it and the fine stunt work of Yuk-Sing Ma.

This movie is almost all Michelle Yeoh, whom I--and, I imagine, most males--enjoy seeing in almost anything. Here for once she is playing a character devoid of glamour and fantasy, and presumably not far different from herself, except in being unlucky, unhappy, unknown, and unappreciated.

It is difficult for me to imagine Ms. Yeoh, even at her youngest and most inexperienced, as having been shy and skittish around a man she liked, or easily led. Otherwise she is convincing and, as always, attractive and likable. But there is one thing I find missing from her performance, as from all her performances, which is made all the clearer in this down-to-earth milieu: her character is never knowable. You don't get to see far down into her, to find out who she is and how she got that way. True, the lack is as much in the script as in the performance, but most actors are able to fill in the spaces in the scripts. Why is the character in this film a stunt woman? Why does she stay a stunt woman? How does she feel about the other characters--her roommate, her director, or the director's son? Her attitude toward life is that of most of Ms. Yeoh's characters: glum resignation, and with good reason; her attitude toward people is one of detached tolerance, generally benevolent but impatient, as if she were an aunt who happened also to be a queen or some supernatural entity (this works best in martial-arts fantasies where the character IS a supernatural entity).

Ms. Yeoh aside, I thought the film a rather interesting treatment of a rather uninteresting story, and was particularly interested that it acknowledged the criminal aspect of the film industry in Hong Kong. But I wished the processes of movie-making and the on-set relationships had been shown in more detail, and that the melodramatics near the end had been avoided, being out of key in a relatively realistic story.

I went into The Stunt Woman expecting it to be about a female stunt performer who takes revenge on the criminal element after they, I don't know, sabotage her film or something. That's not really the case. In fact the movie is a rather slow-paced character study--if this is action filmmaking, it's a very strange approach to it.

Michelle Yeoh plays the title character, who lives in a small apartment with an agreeable roommate and finds work as a "stand-in" with a film crew. There is a criminal underworld at play in the periphery of the film, and they do impact the plot somewhere between the second and third act, but that's not really what the movie is about, per se. It's not a behind-the-scenes glimpse at filmmaking, either. More than anything it strives to be a slice-of-life story about the daily trials and tribulations of a tight-knit below-the-line film crew, focusing on Yeoh in particular.

Despite the slow pace and choppy plot (the movie feels like it was adapted from a novel and the screenwriters never quite settled on what to cut out and what to keep in), I found myself becoming engrossed in The Stunt Woman even as it turned out to be something much different than the kinetic action flick I was expecting. The camaraderie between Yeoh and the rest of her crew is endearing and understated: they take care of each other on and off set, develop an easy familiarity that borders on familial, and pass out on each other after a long night of drinking. You can feel the love that director Ann Hui has for her characters, and probably for her cast and crew; in some ways I imagine The Stunt Woman came from the same place that inspired Tarantino's Once Upon a Time In Hollywood.

The only major downside for me was the cartoonish crime boss villain who shows up two-thirds of the way through. His performance is straight out of a Jackie Chan movie, or something like Kung Fu Hustle. It's out of place in a low-key, quietly observed movie like this.