Ying-Vi Phung – Google

Quite possibly the most overhyped and biggest letdown of 2020. A story where every character is underdeveloped and their actions have no explanations, a plot with time travel, multiple dimensions and more holes in the plot than a sieve. A drama where the secondary actors out act the lead actors without even so much as trying. A lead actor that delivers his lines with the emotion of an automated answering service at a call centre. With so few big budget dramas out at the moment, it could have quite easily been the talking point of the summer, in a sense it was but for all the wrong seasons.

The five episode extended version somehow managed to bypass any detail whatsoever of her life. Important characters in her life are missing, such as her mother, brother and other key friends. Notable characters that are featured such as Leslie Cheung are written very poorly and superficially, and their relationship with Anita are never truly explored, this even applied to her sister who's appearance was reduced to basically a cameo, even in an almost five hour film. All could be forgiven if any important event in Anita's life was in any way explored, but no, the plot jumps from one event to another without any adequate explanations as to what actually happens. For example the film shows her being attacked in Hong Kong but never actually dedicates any time to explain what happened to her attacker, which was very important news back in the day. Even the death of her sister and Leslie Cheung were barely mentioned. When Anita was told of his death, she barely bats an eyelid and then the film jumps to another time period. Heck even her own death is barely explained. One minute she's fine and talking about how she's going to beat her illness, the next she's performing - looking very well and the next we're shown a line to explain that she died shortly after the concert. Didn't the director and writers feel the importance of maybe explaining her struggles so that we could understand what was actually happening? It honestly felt that the actress who played Anita was chosen for her resemblance to the singer rather than acting abilities, which to be fair to her was never given a chance to shine given the very dull plot and very undemanding scenes. With such an interesting life and over hundreds of Anita's songs of which to choose from to feature in the film (only which a handful were actually featured and mostly snippets) it's surprising this film failed to actually give us an insight into her life at all beyond featuring superficial coverage of a few events which were clearly filmed to make her look good but in an artificial way. Louise Wong delivers her dialogue in a demure way, softly spoken and quite lifeless which is a complete contrast to every snippet of the real Anita in the movie. Even the way the real Anita walks in those snippets is unique full of character yet when we return to Louise's scenes, she's moping around and just doesn't behave like Anita. Again I stress that I don't think it's Louise's fault for the way the character is being played, but more the poor direction the director was going for. In summary, I think this was a wasted opportunity that shed very little light on the real life of Anita so it failed as an autobiographical film. It perhaps would have been more interesting as a musical. Maybe next time in the hands of a better writer and director we might actually get an Anita Mui movie someone as famous as her deserves.