December 14, 2017
The Last Women
Standing – China, 2015
Before I get started, a confession: I watched the end credits
of Luo Luo’s well-acted The Last Women Standing
twice. Now normally when one does something as odd as that, it’s because there’s
a particular actor whose name you want to know or because you missed the name
of a friend of yours who worked on the film. Neither of those reasons applies
in this case. No, I sat through rows of job titles and names in search of the
company that had so badly butchered the subtitles on the Blu-ray disc that I
had considered myself lucky to have found. Alas, it was nowhere to be seen.
Therefore, it is incumbent upon me to issue the following warning: Anyone who
lacks a working understanding of Chinese should stay away from The Last Women Standing, for if your
copy is so haphazardly translated as mine was, you’re likely to tear your hair
out in frustration and curse the unnamed company that had the audacity to
release such gobbledygook and call it English. For the record, it’s get in the car, not get on, moody not moldy, and marry someone not marry with
someone.
Okay, rant’s over.
No, I lied. It’s not. See, here’s the thing. At this stage
in their career, neither Shu Qi nor Eddie Peng should be making films like this
one. Shu Qi has earned a place among the great Chinese actress of her generation;
Eddie Peng, while not having the same pedigree in the film industry as Shu Qi,
has quietly carved out a place for himself in Taiwanese cinema. In a perfect
world, the two of them would have their choice of scripts and the time to sift
through them and separate the great from the good and the good from the
atrocious. That they both decided to make The
Last Women Standing indicates that they either cannot pick the films they
make or – and this is the even scarier alternative – they saw something in Luo’s
script that I completely missed – which is entirely possible given the problem
mentioned in the first paragraph.
The Last Women
Standing casts Shu Qi as Sheng Ruxi, a successful thirty-year-old woman who
seems to have a lot going for her – a promising career, a nice apartment, few
financial worries. The only thing she doesn’t have is a husband, and it is this
void that makes her mother (Pan Hong) hang her head in shame. In fact, in the
opening scene, she badmouths her daughter for not being married while she is
sitting next to her at a wedding, and it only gets worse from there. She seems
to be under the impression that having a single daughter in her thirties is the
greatest shame a mother can have. There is some truth to this story line. I
have had students relate to me superstitions about women over thirty no longer
being able to have healthy children and worries that it is harder for women
that age to find love. However, the film makes this the central issue in almost
all of their conversations, and after a few minutes, I was ready for the film
to move on and establish other aspects of their relationship. Sadly, the film
doesn’t acquiesce. It just hammers the point home over and over again, and then
it takes it to an even greater extreme.
Eddie Peng, for his part, plays a young man named Ma Sai. Ma
Sai is five years younger that Ruxi, less experienced in the world, and
somewhat socially inept. He is a gentleman, however. In one brief scene in an
elevator, we see him extend his arm to ensure that Ruxi is not knocked in the
head by a ladder carried by a construction worker. The two of them work
together. She is his superior, and he seems genuinely interested in learning to
do his job well. What they do not appear to be doing is developing romantic feelings
for each other, yet as has happened in so many movies before this one, all it
takes is a night sleeping in the same hotel room together (separate beds of
course) for a mutual interest to begin to develop. Yes, those heartfelt
conversations about love, inexperience, and bloody noses really do the trick,
and in movies it never fails to win a woman’s heart when a man does not hit on
a woman he shouldn’t hit on in the first place. I wonder what makes
screenwriters think that this is so rare that it immediately makes someone a
possibility for love.
This being a romantic film, it has its fair share of idiot
moments, the most egregious of which involve Ruxi. In one scene, she stands at
a window watching fireworks go off and asking aloud, “True love. Where are you?”
In another, she utters words related to spaceships and changing the channels up
in the heavens in an attempt to explain why it is so hard to find Mr. Right.
There’s even a scene in which Ruxi practices saying “I like you” out loud
because, you know, the words are so hard for her to say that she needs to practice.
And of course there is the requisite break-up-and-exit-down-a-long-empty-pier
scene, for in movies a man must always stand and watch helplessly as the woman
he loves walks out of his life. Apparently, his legs and his mouth go utterly numb.
I suspect that the film would have found a groove had it
focused more exclusively on either the relationship between mother and daughter
or that of Ruxi and Ma Sai. Instead, we get subplots galore, the result of
which is a film that spreads itself in so many directions that it can’t do
justice to any of its characters. A subplot involving Ruxi’s boss goes nowhere,
and it is unclear what lesson Ruxi is supposed to learn from a friend who makes
a rather large sacrifice for an ex-boyfriend. There’s also a doctor (Xing
Jiadong) who falls for Ruxi because…well, I’m not actually sure why he does. She is not his type, never agrees with him on anything, and looks as
if she’d rather be anywhere but sitting next to him. He can’t be that
desperate, can he?
As the film reached its final act, I was sure it would
resolve one of its two main plots, yet here I was again unpleasantly surprised.
Instead of a final moment of reconciliation, we get a long heartfelt monologue
from Ruxi’s father (Shih-Chieh King) because apparently fathers can always be
counted on to tell their children not to live for someone else and not to
settle for anything but the best. And so there the film is: at its end with two
completely unresolved story lines, and an ending that left me scribbling only
one word into my notepad: “WHAT?!” I couldn’t even bring myself to write a few
comments about what I liked and disliked about it. Maybe I was still processing
things. More likely I just didn’t care. (on DVD and Blu-ray in Asia)
2 stars
*The Last Women Standing is in Mandarin with truly horrible English subtitles.
