ANN Hui On-wah's latest award-winning feature, Summer Snow, is probably meant to be entertaining rather than a treatise on old age and feminism. Yet, intended or not, this unambitious film has captured the elusive quality of traditional womanhood in Hong Kong which is deeply Chinese, although totally distinct from mainland China and Taiwan.
In the thick of hot talks about anti-discrimination and the greater opportunity for women, it does help to look at the women in the flesh without any attempt to make them prove or illustrate a theory.
And these women are very much flesh and blood. The central protagonist is 40-year-old Mrs Suen, wife of a driving examiner, mother of a teenage son, daughter-in-law of a man going senile, and supervisor in a toilet paper supply company.
There is nothing very advanced about Mrs Suen's thinking or education. Like thousands of working women in Hong Kong, she tries hard to cope with the demands of family and working, and sneaking in a little entertainment for herself.
Mrs Suen's secret, which she blurts out in a moment of panic when her husband suggests that she might have to give up her job and stay home to mind the father, is that her job is her life, and she'd rather die than give it up.
She would do anything - all that is demanded of her as wife and mother and daughter-in-law - in order to be left alone to get on with her job.
