Zhong Wu Yan

A period opera-comedy based on a Chinese folk legend, featuring a complicated love triangle of ambivalent gender. Female outlaw warrior Zheng Wu Yen and a Fairy Enchantress who moves between male and female personas vie for the affections of the Emperor Qi. When enemy kingdoms attack, Wu Yen saves the day, then must decide her romantic fate. Brilliant, goofy comic performances animate farcical interludes that mask an underlying romantic despair; free-floating gender play and Rabelaisian anarchic play offers one solution to the pull of tragic fate. This crazed nonsense comedy at HK speed attacks reality and sanity, in a kinetic blur of unreason as an antidote to terror. (S. Kraicer)