Review | Girlfriends 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
3/5 stars
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.
Finally, we are brought to the start of her romantic yearnings, when Yan (Natalie Hsu En-yi), an innocent high-school girl in 2006 Macau, develops a big crush on her classmate’s sister Faye (Eliz Lao Yee-lum), a college fashion major. It is here that we see the roots of some of the protagonist’s key decisions and memories, which manifest years later in subtle but quietly poignant ways.