More Than Kung Fu

Ah, to be rich and young in Hong Kong. Sleeping all day, partying all night — a laid back life of leisure and luxury. Until your drunken, naked sister mucks it all up. Isn’t that always the way?

Shaw’s modern-day films show just how prepared the studio was to move into television; soap operas to the core, the films revel in the over-the-top trials of Hong Kong’s wealthy.

Much like Summer Heat, which was released almost exactly one year earlier, Torrent Of Desire features an indolent, spoiled youth with an English name, David (Chiao Chuang), his moral companion, Chen Hanming (Yang Fan) and a beautiful woman, Zhu Danfeng (Jenny Hu).

While David’s father travels the world, David drinks and womanizes, coming home only to yell at his sister Mona (Angela Yu Chien), whose only crime is behaving as wantonly as her brother.

But when David meets Zhu, he pins his redemption to her love — not exactly a method approved by Alcoholics Anonymous, but it works. As their relationship blooms, David lays off the sauce.

Of course, nothing could ever be that simple. Chen also loves Zhu, and Mona loves Chen. In these films, those with Chinese names are deferential while those with English names are more wild. So Chen swallows his feelings for the good of his friends and Mona gets drunk, parades around naked and blathers Chen’s secret to anyone she can find.

I enjoy a good soap opera, but Torrent is weakened by two major problems, Chiao Chung and Angela Yu Chien as David and Mona. Chiao Chung was mostly cast in wuxia films, a genre that suited his delicate, otherworldly features. Placed in a suit and tie, he looks out of place. While he was never Shaw’s greatest actor, he was fine in character roles such as Bai Yutang in King Cat. But he wasn’t meant to be a leading man. Torrent was his last Shaw Brothers film.

Angela Yu Chien, on the other hand, made many more films for Shaw thanks to her willingness to get naked on film. The Chinese film industry has always been very traditional and proper. Actresses that got naked on screen have rarely been able to throw off the taint and become “serious” actresses.

Because of this, actresses that took off their clothes were a rare commodity, so the roles were filled by women whose acting skills were a secondary consideration.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that Angela Yu Chien isn’t very good. Mona could have been a sympathetic character, a woman that turned to debauchery in order to cover a broken heart. Instead, Yu portrays her as a drunken cat in heat.

Director Lo Chen may bear some of the responsibility for Yu, but his films are usually pretty good, so I’ll cut him some slack. Lo also livens up the film with a great opening sequence that mixes deep reds and sickly greens to introduce the siblings. Later on, he replaces a scene’s saccharine dialog with Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” which tells the audience all they need to know. Clever.

Torrent Of Desire (sometimes listed as Torrents Of Desire)
Dir: Lo Chen
Released: November 7, 1969