Reviewed by: meixner Date: 04/09/2000 Summary: Overdone but still interesting Art Film 4 absurdist short films starring Sandra Ng about "woman". A very strange and somewhat pretentious movie, that while extremely disorienting has touches of genuine brilliance, which are unfortunately rare. Recommended for its oddity, not an altogether unworthy effort though.

Reviewed by: jfierro Date: 12/21/1999 A movie so self-concious about its high aspirations that it becomes powerless. A few flashes of brilliance, but mostly what you would expect from a smug, intellectual film student. Partially redeemed by Sandra Ng's overwhelming performance.

Reviewed by: shelly Date: 12/09/1999 An unlikely combination of talents has created a quirky,fascinating movie. Actress Sandra Ng and writer/director Gan Kwok-Leung assembled a collection of Hong Kong's finest art film- and alternative music-makers (many in the Wong Kar-Wai orbit, including cinematographer Christopher Doyle, editors William Chang and Chan Kei-Hop, and Jan Lamb [whose new movie WKW is supervising]) to produce "4 Faces of Eve", which is both a Sandra Ng vehicle and an "alternative" movie. "4 Faces" is divided into four well-defined parts, each lasting about 25 minutes. The first, "Mao", stages several encounters between Ng as white-wigged prostitute and Lamb as her psychiatrist-in-training. There is a more than passing resemblance to Fallen Angels. Part two, "Blowing in the Wind", is the most original and the most exasperating section. A frenetic hand-held camera records a virtually dialogue-free sequence of scenes. Eric Kot, his wife / companion Ng (who gets to sport a grossly disfigured face and hunched body) and her family (kids and grandma) chatter wordlessly, scream, and generally make themselves understood though grunts and nonsense syllables, much like characters in a Jacques Tati comedy. Grotesquely, clownishly, surreal. "Twins" is the third and most impressive sequence. It is beautifully shot in chromatically-distorted, heavily pixelated grainy video. The narrative is again structured to be deliberately ambiguous. Sandra Ng seems to play ultra-rich twins, one bed-ridden, comatose; the other, her elder sister, dresses as a man, except when she cross-cross dresses as her sister to murder the latter's lover (or so she claims). Total confusion is averted by Chan Kar-Luk's lyrical score (which nevertheless veers towards parody), and by Doyle's rapturously gorgeous video photography. Part four is the least demanding: a farce called "Love Game" about a TV game show that catches husbands in adulterous situations, then asks their wives to guess the mistress's identities! Ng is the apparently long-suffering wife, Chingmy Yau the mistress, and Jan Lamb the host of this expressionistically rendered satire of TV entertainment. Details are what makes this film click. "4 Faces" works as a pastiche of brilliant, bizarre and gorgeous moments, rather than as an integrated whole. And the same is true of Sandra Ng's performances in all 4 sections: as "Eve", an everywoman with multiple faces. She delivers sustained, committed work, and strikes an impressive array of varied character-poses. A provocative, irritating, sometimes almost unwatchable, sometimes delightful experiment of a movie. Its thesis, if any, is that: these days, the sum of the parts can add up to far more than any putative whole. Reviewer Score: 8

Reviewed by: hkcinema Date: 12/08/1999 Four shorts starring Sandra Ng, which allows her acting diversity to shine through. Unfortunately the 'artsy' cam work tends to be more of a diversion and the fact that the stories are CONFUSING and hard to follow makes this movie very annoying to watch. This is a head scratcher of a movie (you may scratch clean through to your scalp if you watch this throughout). I found I was more interested in the unique shape of Sandra Ng's ears than this 'art' film. [Reviewed by Jennie Tam]

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