Wong-Kar Wai's film, named "The Hand," stars gong li as Miss Hua, a prostitute who is at the top of her game the first time the shy tailor Zhang meets her. He has been sent by his boss to design her clothes, and as he waits in her living room, he clearly hears the sounds of sex on the other side of the wall. Her client leaves, she summons him, and curtly interrogates him. He passes muster. To be sure he will think about her while designing her clothes, she says, she will supply him with an aid to his memory. This she does; the film's title is a clue.
It is erotic. At least I found it so, and in matters of eroticism, one is always the only judge who matters. The film has no nudity, no explicit sex, no lingering shots of gong li's beauty. It is about situation and personality . She sees him, understands him, creates his obsession with her almost casually. Later, when he comes to measure her again, he uses his hands instead of a tape measure. She allows him. There is an extraordinary scene in his tailor shop where his hands and arms venture inside her dress as if she were wearing it. Time passes. There is a sad and poetic closure.
The Antonioni film is an embarrassment. Regina Nemni acts all of her scenes wearing a perfectly transparent blouse for no other reason, I am afraid, than so we can see her breasts. Luisa Ranieri acts mostly in the nude. The result is soft-core porn of the most banal variety, and when the second woman begins to gambol on the beach one yearns for Russ to come to the rescue. When you see a woman gamboling in the nude in a Meyer film, you stay gamboled with.
As i don 't like Steven Soderbergh's,film, "Equilibrium" so i pass it.
I return to wong kawei's "The Hand." It stays with me. The characters expand in my memory and imagination. I feel empathy for both of them: Miss Hua, sadly accepting the fading of her beauty, the disappearance of her clients, the loss of her health, and Mr. Zhang, who will always be in her thrall. "I became a tailor because of you," he says. It is the greatest compliment it is within his power to give, and she knows it. Knows it, and is touched by it as none of the countless words of her countless clients have ever, could ever, touch her.
“I have nothing except the hands will you like it?”
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