The Stunt Woman

The Stunt Woman begins as a Hong Kong variation on Truffaut's Day for Night, but later abandons the ode to stuntmen who put their bodies and lives on the line for the amazement of viewers. Ann Hui did not intend to celebrate movie magic, but rather to tell the story of the title character and the two men in her life (as indicated by the two intertitles with their names embedded in a film bearing the name of its female protagonist). Through this film with a touch of melodrama, she offers an eloquent depiction of the status of women not only in the film industry, but also in Hong Kong society as a whole. The crucial elements for the portrayal of the stuntwoman Ah Kam are not only her physical abilities on set, but also all of the other female characters, from her promiscuous roommate to the call girls at the bar that she runs for a while to the various wives, mothers and widows who are briefly glimpsed or only mentioned in the narrative. Ah Kam always remains different, refusing to conform to any formulaically predefined role, because of which her life may sometimes seem unfulfilled from a traditional perspective, but she always remains unrestrained and her own person. As such, however, she can never escape from being forced into and perceived through the lens of a standard pigeonhole due to her circumstances. After all, this becomes apparent in the shift in meaning of the distribution titles – while the original title is simply the Shakespearean Ah Kam, foreign distributors came up with the restrictive title The Stunt Woman, which expresses only a small part of what the heroine and the film itself are all about. (10/10/2021)