By Brian Hu

Cecilia Cheung shops till she drops...into the arms of two pathologically incapable millionaires. And that's just the beginning of Hong Kong's funniest film of 2006.

I put Shopaholics on my list of the best Asian films of 2006. Let me explain.

As the title and cooky movie poster suggests, this is a romantic comedy about urbanites addicted to shopping. That's about as imaginatively high concept as Hong Kong cinema gets these days, and that itself made the film just a little better than industry average. It sure started off that way: abandoned as a baby at the intersection of Gucci and LV stores, Cecilia Cheung (the shopaholic) is fired from her job and unable to feed her addiction, so she sees a psychiatrist played by Lau Ching-wan (who is pathologically unable to make decisions). Just as their romance is about to sprout, enter a billionaire played by Francis Ng who schizophrenically alternates between shopaholism and compulsive stinginess (and you'll never guess why).

To solve this little problem, the film poses a question: is money and consumption the cure for romance, or is it the other way around? A pressing philosophical question indeed. Fortunately, it doesn't take long before the filmmakers realize the futility of trying to answer it, and abandons that plot altogether in favor of the craziest four-way wedding scene since the finale of Preston Sturges's The Palm Beach Story. Blazing through at breakneck speed, yet making a disturbing amount of good sense along the way, the final 30 minutes of Shopaholics is Hong Kong cinema at its craziest -- what HK scholar/buff David Bordwell celebrates as "all too extravagant, too gratuitously wild." Instead of solving the film's dilemma through the usual melodramatic formula (love wins over money), it smartly side-steps it with a Keystone-esque "chase" sequence conducted by Jesus, Eurasian angels, and Carl Jung. The tacked-on romantic ending takes away none of the fun. God bless Hong Kong cinema.

Published: Friday, January 12, 2007