Tri-Star (1996)

AKA: Tristar

Director: Tsui Hark

Writer: Tsui Hark

Producer: Tsui Hark

Cast: Leslie Cheung, Anita Yuen, Lau Ching-Wan, Raymond Wong

Running Time: 110 min.

Plot: A priest hears a prostitute's confession, a tale which has a 200,000 HK$ debt as its centerpiece. The prostitute accidentally leaves behind an envelope with her address in the confessional. Concealing his true occupation, the priest rents another room in her apartment and begins to straighten out her life. But then the prostitute starts to fall in love with the priest...

EQUINOX21'S REVIEW: Tri-star is an extremely strange Tsui Hark movie. It's more or less one of those comedies where everyone in it is a quirky goofball except for the completely normal main character (in this case a priest, Father Zhong played by Leslie Cheung). Unfortunately, this romantic comedy didn't have much of either romance or comedy, but it was decent enough that it's worth it for the price you can get it for on DVD.

Father Zhong is a young, debonair priest that all the women fall in love with (even during their own weddings that he's performing). One day, when he's in a confessional booth and an on the lam prostitute, Bai Xuehua (Anita Yuen), runs in to hide, he hears her confession and her story about owing a large sum of money to the Triad boss, "Dinosaur". Since she doesn't know his identity, Zhong decides to move in with Bai and her prostitute room-mates to try to help them turn their lives around. However, on his case is the destitute looking cop, Fa (Lau Ching-wan) and his dumb but handsome partner. Can Zhong help them turn their lives around and come up with the money they owe before the loan-shark's men come for them? Well, duh· obviously. It wouldn't be much of a movie if he didn't.

There were very few funny parts to this movie, but I have a strong suspicion that a lot of it was lost in translation (I could tell that it wasn't translated accurately based on the dual Chinese/English burned in subs that showed words left out of the English portion). It also wasn't a very romantic movie, as the main character was a priest (and a dedicated one at that), who wasn't about to go falling in love or, at the very least, wasn't going to go around showing it. Probably the funniest part of the movie was the musical interlude where they're performing a Cantonese/Techno cover of "Itsy-Bitsy, Teenie-Weenie, Yellow Polka-dot Bikini".

The acting was probably the best part of the movie. Lau Ching-wan plays a completely over-the-top cop who dresses like a bum, and he plays it probably as well as it could have been played. Leslie Cheung plays a clean-cut, almost naive priest, and I can't truly imagine anyone else in that role. Anita Yuen plays a prostitute who hides her true emotions by acting the opposite of how she's feeling (this got a little goofy when she'd be crying when she was happy and laughing when she was sad). Overall, the acting was probably the only reason any of it was funny at all, because the plot and the characters were all pretty ordinary.

All in all, Tri-star is an ok movie that will probably never get watched by anyone more than once or twice. It was mildly amusing, but not funny. It's one to watch only if you really like all the actors involved.

EQUINOX21'S RATING: 7/10