MOVIE REVIEW : ‘AH YING’: A LOW-KEY, SUBTLE FILM WITH CHARM

Allen Fong’s “Ah Ying” (at the Monica 4-Plex and the Grande downtown) is as endearing as its young heroine, who sells fish at a Hong Kong public market but who dares to dream of becoming an actress.

Low-key and subtle, it is as fresh and welcome as a breeze wafting over the awesomely crowded city in which Ah Ying (Hui So-Ying) and her family of 10 live in two rooms in one of Hong Kong’s high-rise tenements. Of her many brothers and sisters, Ah Ying is the only one her parents can depend upon to help them out at work and at home. She is also the only one with discernible ambitions.

Ah Ying has a shining intelligence and quiet determination that set her apart from others. These qualities catch the attention of an instructor (Peter Wang, who also collaborated on the script with Sze Yeung-Ping) at Hong Kong’s Film Culture Centre, where she has signed up as a helper, scrubbing floors and cleaning projectors.

The impact of these two upon each other reveals the process of individual self-discovery amid shifting cross-cultural currents. The instructor is as much a seeker as his pupil.

For all its modest charm (which its stars themselves possess in abundance), the film is in its way demanding, especially when it alternates between lengthy, talky scenes set in the classroom and in the tiny quarters of Ah Ying’s family. What emerges is important, and they’re as worth paying attention to as are similar sequences in an Eric Rohmer film.

If “Ah Ying,” which glows with workaday, not tourist, images of Hong Kong, has an exceptionally authentic ring to it, it should, for Hui So-Ying is in fact virtually playing herself, as are many others in the film. Thus, the film becomes quite a display of her--and Fong’s--talent, skill and naturalness. Wang, whose character is based on Hui’s late mentor, film maker Koh Wu, provides the perfect foil for Hui’s essential seriousness. Slight and handsome, with a vibrant personality and a crinkly smile, Wang, who adopted a slight limp for the part, makes the instructor seem at once resilient and vulnerable, a mature man--he may be 40--whose humor, wisdom and discipline are so inspiring to the earnest Ah Ying.

“Ah Ying” (Times-rated Family) belongs to that new group of films that are bridging the American, Hong Kong and China experience. It has much of the wryness and intimacy of Wayne Wang’s “Chan Is Missing” and is similar to “Dim Sum” in its depiction of family life with its affections and tensions.