Panty Twist
Riley Yip makes her debut with Hong Kong’s most charming, feminine and messy coming-of-age dramedy in ages. More Yip, please.
Blossoms Under Somewhere
Director: Riley Yip • Writers: Riley Yip, Sze Ling-ling
Starring: Marf Yau, Sheena Chan, Adam Pak, Shin Cheung
Hong Kong • 1hr 37mins
Opens Hong Kong Nov 21 • IIB
Grade: B+
Writer and first-time director Riley Yip Yuk-ying has done something in Blossoms Under Somewhere | 寄了一整個春天 that few filmmakers have managed in Hong Kong, or elsewhere for that matter, and that’s make a movie about high school girls coming of age actually about high school girls. It’s only been in the last few years that’s happened: Olivia Wilde did it in Book Smart. Greta Gerwig did it to a degree in Lady Bird. Jeong Jae-eun’s Take Care of My Cat is a good one. Are you sensing a pattern? Fancy that: chicks know a thing or two about chicks.
No one’s discounting Pedro Almodóvar’s work but there’s just something about game recognising game that makes for a truly connective watch. And news flash: I’m not a teenaged Hongkonger attending an elite, heavily Jesus-y girls’ school but guess what? Yip and co-writer Sze Ling-ling have done what every filmmaker should. Make you “get” the characters no matter how unlike them you may be and recognise something in their story. If you like them, all the better.
And yeah, I like Ching (Marf Yau Tin-tung, King Maker winner and Collar member) and Rachel (Sheena Chan Shu-yan, The Lyricist Wannabe) the best girlfriends at the centre of Blossoms, who we watch flail and fuck up as they fumble their way to young adulthood in their own ways. What makes Blossoms such a pleasure, imperfect though it may be, is how honest it is without being earnest, how much agency it allows Ching and Rachel, and how non-judgmental it is. Yip may not have been able to communicate every idea she has floating around her head succinctly, but there’s an appealing, naturalistic messiness to Blossoms that bodes well for her next film.
Hold on to your knickers
At the heart of Blossoms Under Somewhere is the idea of how and why we communicate now – or how we don’t. We meet Ching and Rachel doing your average high school thing. They both attend the fancy and constantly moralising girls school St Lina’s (it’s actually Ying Wah), where Rachel is the vaguely slutty troublemaker and Ching is the good girl class pet – at least according to St Lina’s principal, who all the girls have dubbed Snape (Paisley Hu Puiwei). Rachel’s not infallible, particularly when it comes to dudes, but nine times out of 10 she has Ching’s back, which is important: Ching has a stutter that renders her almost silent around anyone but Rachel. Rachel and her phone, which is both reassuringly anonymous and text-based and also the headquarters for her and Rachel’s retail side hustle. Realising Hong Kong’s pervs will pay good gong bai for used girls’ underwear they sell their worn knickers online for extra cash. For the pragmatic Rachel the men buying her undies are just clients, but when one of them, Gabriel (Adam Pak Tin-nam, A Guilty Conscience), makes genuine overtures towards Ching things get messy. Messy enough to drive a wedge between Rachel and Ching, and drive Ching into the arms of her favourite courier, Ben (Shin Cheung Yuk-hin). Not once during any of Ching and Rachel’s business dealings does Yip judge them (or their customers) and there’s something invigorating about how confident they are in their work. It’s Anora lite.
Yip and Sze don’t get structurally creative with Blossoms; it’s a coming-of-age drama with all its conventions and they follow the rules and let the story take the expected path to its standard resolution. But their script throws in enough detours to make it feel like they’re subverting the path just a little bit. Noticeably absent from the film is any kind of parent, guardian or other adult with the exception of Snape, who is very clearly the story’s antagonist, and a couple of dirty old men (one played by producer Fruit Chan in a cameo). Ching is left to figure herself out on her own, with occasional advice from Rachel, the other girls at school, and what she gleans from her online interactions. Ching’s metaphoric stutter cover a lot of bases – the first blush of romance, burgeoning sexuality, female friendship, navigating connection beyond the iPhone screen – and it makes for an ever so slightly scattered film. Yip has a lot on her mind, and every so often Blossoms feels like the overstuffed work of a young filmmaker afraid this is their one shot, but in the end she manages to wrangle all the threads into a single coherent yarn. Yau is ostensibly the star – she’s approachable and awkward – but Chan steals her thunder as the ballsy Rachel. She’s the DGAF pal we all wish we could be sometimes, and the two actors have an easy, believable dynamic that carries the film through its overstuffed moments. Blossoms’ goes full random in its closing animated sequence, one of those scenes you get a lurking suspicion you know where it’s heading, and when it does it’s as triumphant as it is inevitable. It’s not as fatalistic as the final frame of Thelma and Louise – Blossoms simmers with optimism – but the way it unites the entire female student body will inspire a private fist pump in your seat. One of Hong Kong’s best of 2024.