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Asian cinema: Hong Kong film
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ReviewGirlfriends movie review: Fish Liew and Jennifer Yu reunite for tender lesbian romance

Tracy Choi’s semi-autobiographical, episodic drama gives an intimate portrait of a woman searching for her place at different stages of life

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Fish Liew (left) and Jennifer Yu in a still from Girlfriends (category: IIB, Cantonese, Mandarin). Directed by Tracy Choi and co-starring Elizabeth Tang.
Edmund Lee

3/5 stars

Macau filmmaker Tracy Choi Ian-sin revisits the tender, nostalgic tone of her directorial debut, Sisterhood (2016), for this semi-autobiographical lesbian drama. Girlfriends charts a young woman’s coming-of-age experience and ongoing quest to find her place in the world through three episodes from separate periods of her life, unfolding in reverse chronological order and under different names.

It opens in 2024 Hong Kong, where the Macau-born director Lok (Fish Liew Chi-yu) has been struggling to secure her second project after the early success of her first feature. Despite the emotional support of her live-in partner Bei Bei (Jennifer Yu Heung-ying), a cheerful actress who wants to start a family, Lok appears as conflicted as ever about her life’s direction.

The film then takes us back to 2010 Taipei, where Choi (Elizabeth Tang Tao) is a university student preparing for her graduation project. Although she shows her assertive side on campus by protesting the closure of the city’s legal brothels, she is far less decisive in her own relationship with Kai-ching (Han Ning), her considerate Taiwanese girlfriend, even with the couple’s passionate sex life.

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