The New York Asian Film Festival runs from June 28th to July 14th, 2019. For more information, click here.
Missbehavior, or as its Chinese title apparently translates to, Congratulations Bitches, is a hit and miss comedy. When it tries to get us to invest in the petty squabbles of its core girl squad, it falters. But when it devotes its energy to pulling off raucous lowbrow set pieces, it shines. Luckily, the film knows enough to pick up speed as it goes along until the rough nature of the opening is forgotten, and by the end it’s gotten more than its fair share of laughs.
The story is a simple one, wherein police officer May (a too-brief cameo by Gigi Leung) organizes a reunion between the old members of their friend group in order to help June (June Lam Siu-ha) keep her job by… finding breast milk to replace the bottle which she unknowingly added to a client’s cappuccino. Led by Isabel (Isabel Chan), whose falling out with May is one of the key factors in the group’s dissolution, they engage in a series of harebrained schemes to get breast milk at any cost.
They’ve all fallen out with one another for one petty reason for another, and so their ridiculous quest doubles as an opportunity to remind one another of their connection and rekindle the friendships that once meant so much to them.
Of course, humor is subjective, so maybe others found the opening twenty minutes, where we meet our heroines (and heroes) as they are forced to reunite in order to help one of their own, will play better for others than it did for me. But writer-director Pang Ho-cheung opens the movie with a certain slackness; getting all the pieces in place felt like a slog, with joke after joke falling flat. And judging by the pin-prick silence during a fair amount of those opening scenes, I was not alone in that feeling.
Happily, it gets better. In fact, it’s actually easy to pinpoint the moment when the film kicks into high gear: the brief appearance of a hilariously gruff Lam Suet as a belligerent restaurant owner who has no patience whatsoever for customers of any kind. From his brief scene on, the movie scores fairly consistent laughs (none of which I’m going to spoil here, except to say by far the bit that played the best with the audience was a home invasion that becomes a impromptu first aid lesson and a defense of emergency service workers and their right to be perverts…).
It’s these gleefully absurd moments that work best in the film: perhaps, surprisingly, the parts that don’t all revolve around the attempts at character based humor. Much to my own surprise from a director whose writing credits include Vulgaria and Sex Duties Unit, the film is utterly sincere in its affection for its cartoon protagonists. But in the end, they’re all just that — cartoons — and trying to get us to invest in them seems like a… fairly curious choice.
Everyone gives it their all and prove worthy comic talents, but it’s just a big ask for the audience to care about silly dramas like the enmity between former songwriting duo Minibus (Yanki Din) and Rosilin (Dada Chan) when their sole character traits are ‘writes silly songs on ukulele’ and ‘writes bad books and has big boobs’.
The only one of these moments that plays at all is the scene where lovers Boris (Tan Han-jin, the film MVP) and Frank (Chui Tien-you) finally have a confrontation about their diminished sex life. When the truth behind their diminished desires is finally revealed, it’s both very silly and curiously touching, one of the few heartfelt moments in the movie that actually works.
As far as these sorts of things go when it comes to comedy, it’s better to start out weak and end strong then start out great and then run out of steam, and if Missbehavior takes a while to get going, at least it sends the audience out of the theater pretty well satisfied.