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Teenage Love (1968)
Director: Chan Lit Ban
Cast: Connie Chan, Lui Kei, Lydia
Shum
Publisher: Universe; Format: VCD
English subtitles: No
The beautiful and elegant Lei-fai
(Connie Chan), accompanied by her best friend (Lydia Shum),
brings some Christmas presents and a bit of joy to the orphanage
in which she grew up. There she meets Ti-wan (Lui Kei), a rich
and handsome guy who loves to flirt. Ti-wan’s parents can’t bear
all the gossip about his many girlfriends. So one day his father
pretends to be seriously ill and tells him that before he dies he’d
like to get to know his fiancée. Ti-wan of course doesn’t
even have a steady girlfriend, so he ask Lei-fai to pretend to be
his fiancée. She is not very enthusiastic about deceiving his
parents but decides to help him out only because she thinks it will
be a matter of a few minutes. However, Ti-wan’s father ends up liking
Lei-fai so much that he invites her to live with them, and to make
sure that she doesn’t refuse, he promptly has another sudden, terrible
attack of his mysterious illness.
Intricate and funny, Teenage
Love is a nice movie from director Chan Lit-ban, who
is best known for his martial-arts films. Laughter, tenderness,
improbable situations, silly dances that pop out of nowhere, cute
songs, pretty clothes, and a lengthy opera performance featuring
Connie and her real-life parents: all of these help the viewer enjoy
a not particularly original story. The film does suffer a bit for
containing so much deception. All the characters, even the good ones,
don’t do anything but deceive each other all the time. The message
seems to be that deception is something positive and even unavoidable,
because it is the best method to ensure a happy relations.
What Teenage Love lacks
in morality, it sufficiently makes up for in star power.
Although his character is secondary, Lui Kei is nonetheless
attractive and bold as usual (especially with his gestures and
eyes) and does a silly dance with Connie where they both wear huge
masks. Connie Chan’s beauty shines, thanks more to her dresses and
hairstyles than to her role. Her character is in fact the typical
nice and well-educated girl, but she’s missing the personality,
the strong temper, the rustic and sometimes rough behavior that makes
Connie Chan the most unique princess of Cantonese stardom. Consequently,
it feels like Lei-fai could have been suitably played by lots
of other actresses. As for Lydia Shum, she is terrific and funny.
Too often relegated to superfluous and stereotyped roles, in
Teenage Love she exhibits
an incredible freedom: we see her disguised as a man (looking a lot
like John Belushi in The Blues Brothers), taking
Connie on her lap, flirting with her, and feeding her mouth-to-mouth
with a chicken leg! Yue Ming plays Lui Kei’s father with his usual self-confidence,
half way between farce and cabaret.
Teenage Love
does entertain and comes in an unusually polished package.
But the feeling one gets from watching it is decidedly mild:
not too good, not too bad; just pleasantly average.
Reviewed by Valentina Verrocchio
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Connie pretends to be Lui Kei’s
fiancee.
Connie and Lui Kei cheer up his dad
with some calypso.
Connie performing opera with her
real-life mother Gung Fan Hung.
Connie Chan and Lydia Shum (in drag)
conspire to make Lui Kei jealous.
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