Review of "The Laundryman" 青田街一號

I caught this movie at its special presentation during the Singapore International Film Festival held at Marina Bay Sands' Sands Theatre on 27 November. Before the movie was screened, the director Li Chung and the cast members Sonia Sui and Yeo Yann Yann went on stage to greet the invited guests and press which unfortunately I wasn't able to get close to since there was a security line to separate the invited guests and other members of the audience. Nonetheless, I was still able to catch a glimpse of Sonia Sui from a couple of metres away when she stood briefly in front of the movie's poster for a photo-taking session. She was really stunning in person even though she had just given birth to her son not that long ago and literally dazzled with her dress. It was a pity though that Joseph Chang who was one of the leads, was not able to come to Singapore and I wondered why especially considering how significant he is in the cast lineup.

Before the movie started, the director and cast were invited on stage to greet the audience. Apparently, the two actresses had not seen the final version of the movie yet so the director was joking that he was "worried" for his life since he had to leave many scenes on the editing room's floor. In particular, he was apologetic towards Yeo because her part was affected to a large extent. I gather from the fact that the movie was about 1.5 hour long, there must have been a lot of editing done to make sure that the story could flow smoothly within such a short period of time. Then again, when there is a need to make so many cuts, it makes me wonder too as to whether they might go overboard with it just to meet the time limit and if the story would be adversely affected.

To classify this movie under a particular genre would be somewhat difficult as there was a deliberate attempt to blend comedy, action, romance and criminology into this film. I thought that it was a very ambitious attempt on the part of the director who was making his directorial debut with this film. Considering the length of the film, I did have concerns over how the story structure would be affected.

Before I begin sharing my views on this film, here's a summary of the storyline. There is an old-style laundry shop which operates in a quiet street on Qingtian Street where the beautiful owner Ah Gu (Sonia Sui) is actually the boss of a group of killers and the laundry shop is a front to cover up the tracks of these killers by "washing" away the corpses of the victims. Among the killers, the top killer is Qingtianjie Yihao (No.1 of Qingtian Street) played by Joseph Chang as nicknamed by Ah Gu because he is the best among his peers. There is not much blood and gore since he kills in a relatively clean manner e.g. breaking the neck of his victims or strangling them. The actual dirty part of the job is done in the laundry shop when the corpses are put into the machines and you actually see blood from the transparent water tubes. Of late, No.1 has been suffering from seeing the spirits of his victims haunting and following him around to the extent that he does not dare to stay at home. When No.1 tells Ah Gu about his problems, she dismisses this as mere hallucinations and that he shouldn't be scared of those spirits. Nonetheless, when he insists on solving the problem so as to keep his sanity and get his life back to normal, Ah Gu introduces him to a psychic (Wan Qian) which leads to an unlikely romance developing between them. On the other hand, Yeo plays a female police officer who is investigating the series of disappearances and comes to find out the true identity of Ah Gu and the dark secret she is hiding.

As I mentioned earlier, the biggest concern I had was whether the story would flow well despite the short running time and the editing which had to be done. Frankly speaking, I thought that the story had its bright points such as the part where the man making toy models was pining for his neighbour and sought to kill the latter's husband as he was abusing his wife, the interaction between No.1 and the psychic or the fighting sequences in the climax involving Ah Gu, No.1 and the police officer which were entertaining to watch. During the post-screening talk section, there was a lot of mention of how they tried to be as realistic as possible by using real weapons such as knives or not pulling back punches. In that sense, the movie does have its bright spots and I applaud the crew and staff's efforts in making this movie.

However, if I am to judge the story as a whole, I thought that there were too many elements clamouring for my attention thus leading to me having difficulty trying to make sense of how each part correlated to one another or sustain my attention for the entire span of the movie. In addition, I thought that the pacing was slightly uneven when too much time was spent on some parts while the reverse happened for some other parts. The part about the model man was supposed to be funny but at one juncture, I thought that the joke was getting a bit stale. On the other hand, I would have liked to know more about Ah Gu's background and her rationale for doing what she did but I felt that there was too little devoted to this important fact. As a result of this problem, the biggest casualty would be Yeo who had a really forgettable role other than she was beaten up really badly by Sui in the climax scenes. It felt so odd to see Yeo pop up of nowhere and suddenly go to the laundry shop to confront the baddie when she wasn't featured too prominently initially in the investigation process.

As for the acting, I thought that Joseph Chang and Wan Qian did quite well to make an impression on me and had pretty good chemistry (there were in fact rumours of them dating). My impression of Chang in the past was that he seemed more like a tough guy but this movie showed that he's capable of doing comedy well. Too bad on the action front, they made him look like a weakling in front of Ah Gu who was supposed to be a doctor but strangely could fight that well. In the end, Ah Gu didn't lose because she was poor at fighting which I thought was a rather bad way to end the fighting sequence. The romance factor between Chang and Wan's characters was implied rather than expressly displayed so it did feel a bit odd when you suddenly realise that they had developed feelings for each other. I didn't really mind that but somehow, it felt really out of place.

As for Sui, I felt that she was not featured as much as I assumed when I watched the trailer which was a pity. I had the impression that she was the female lead but the movie featured more interaction between Chang and Wan rather than between her and Chang. In fact, Wan seems to have appeared more than Sui in the movie. As such, I thought that if her role of Ah Gu could be developed further to show a more complete picture of who she was, that might have convinced me why she did what she did. After watching the movie, it just gives the impression that Ah Gu was obsessed with some weirdo ideology and she was a psychopath of some sorts which I thought was not a fair representation of herself. Likewise for Yeo, she didn't get the chance to show what she was capable of doing. Especially after hearing about how she went through lessons to prepare for the filming, there must be more than meets the eye for her role which unfortunately couldn't be seen by the audience.

In conclusion, I found that the movie did not really meet up to my expectations which I attributed to the trailer looking more exciting than the actual film. In his directorial debut, there were some rough edges which I thought that the director could have been able to smooth over if he had more experience. The editing done might have gone overboard to affect the fluidity of the movie which I thought was a great pity because I think this could have potentially done better if it was 2 hours long. Luckily, the movie still had some bright spots in its story and the acting was fairly good given the time constraint and choppy editing. If there could be a DVD version with a director's cut which can add more body to the story, I think I might be interested to check this out again.