Advertisement

Also showing: Monie Tung & Don Li

Reading Time:2 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
0

Playing a nightclub escort who resorts to prostitution because of drug addiction, Monie Tung Man-lee took up smoking to make her performance in Herman Yau Lai-to's Whispers and Moans more convincing - and was hooked for three months after shooting ended. Don Li Yat-long, meanwhile, spent evenings trawling Sham Shui Po's backstreets, observing routines he could feed into his turn as a transsexual sex worker - useful research, given that his drag-queen character has a steamy relationship with a male prostitute.

The gritty performances of Tung and Li are even more trailblazing, considering their standing in local show business as squeaky-clean singers.

'The director didn't approach me with the role, I approached him,' says Tung. 'I was offered a milder role, as a straightforward escort. But I wanted to play [the drug-addled] Aida. [Yau] asked me whether I was worried about tarnishing my image. It's a role that offers more opportunities to flex my muscles, and it's more fun to do that.'

Li is equally adamant about his choice of playing the cross-dressing Joey. 'You don't run into serious films tackling the state of the sex industry every day. The major challenge was convincing my company to let me be in it,' says Li, who's with Emperor Entertainment Group. 'I told them I wouldn't be able to have a convincing crack at it in a few years' time - and I'm not interested in playing students all the time.'

What's impressive about the pair (above) is how their enthusiasm for more wayward roles is matched with stellar acting that belies their pop careers. The young cast deliver authentic performances, complete with the vulgarisms and nihilist vibes demanded by Yang Yee-shan's script.

'Everyone thinks I'm too genteel as a person, and it's going to be boring if I stick with that persona,' says Tung, whose last screen role was as a frivolous, teenage single mother in My Mother Is a Belly Dancer. Her interest in taking up less savoury roles - and her management's open attitude about her pursuing such projects - can be seen as a seismic shift in how pop stars are nurtured today. The young stars of Whispers and Moans mirror the career of Isabella Leong Lok-sze, whose pop princess status has been eclipsed by her new role as a darling of arthouse cinema, having travelled to the Berlin Film Festival for two consecutive years with her acclaimed roles in Pang Ho-cheung's Isabella (which also won her a best actress award in Portugal, and a nomination at the Hong Kong Film Awards) and Zero Chou Mei-ling's lesbian romance Spider Lilies.

Advertisement