Three Love Affairs (aka Factory Queen)

Hong Kong's industrialisation was blossoming in the 1960s. The city was hungry for labour with less physical demands. A lot of women, be it young or middle-aged, would step out of their family and became the so-called "factory girls". With his creative sensitivity, Mok Hong-si was able to utilise this socioeconomic background at that time, moulding a new image for modern Hong Kong women. In Three Love Affairs, Ting Ying's character, Yeung Wai-fong, is the perfect embodiment of this kind of post-war independent female. Wai-fong is kind, energetic and being crowned as the "Factory Queen" in a shoe factory. She meets To Wai-lun (Cheung Yee), a driver, in a salon. They both have a little crush on each other but under the influences of their friends, they decide to conceal their class background by pretending to be rich and posh. Though they feel upset about lying, they dare not tell each other the truth. On the other hand, the lies they have told gradually escalate into several engaging comic situations. The film's comic mechanism comes to a peak when Chan Lap-bun and Yuen Lap-cheung both put on an act to be the couple's "rich" parents. This absurd yet funny act cannot last long. They've finally realised that they should not lie to each other. The ending remarkably reiterates a felt affirmation about being truthful and honest in love. While the theme of mistaken identities has been a recurring motif in Mok's oeuvre, it does not lapse into a cliché. This time the film, both directed and written by Mok, has been given an extraordinary fluidity in its placing of comic situations.

Date	Time	Venue
4/6/2016 (Sat)	7:30pm	Cinema, Hong Kong Film Archive

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