KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 7 — Action flick Mrs K which opens in cinemas today boasts a line-up of international stars but also comes with a hint of Malaysian flavour.
Ho Yuhang, the award-winning Petaling Jaya-born director of Mrs K, said he avoided cliches usually seen in movies set in Malaysia such as shots of the iconic Petronas Twin Towers, Kuala Lumpur Tower and touristy Bukit Bintang.
“I didn’t want to make a very typical Malaysian kind of movie, because in the film a lot of characters are not even from here, they have settled here.
“The story is about a housewife but she’s from elsewhere, so that’s the gist of the story, it’s about a housewife who has a past.
“So there are a lot of people who are outsiders, then they come here and things happen here, so Malaysia is like the battleground... so these are the people who show up,” he told Malay Mail Online.
The movie was written for its lead actress Hong Kong martial arts film icon Kara Wai and includes Hong Kong veteran actor Simon Yam, Taiwan rock star Wu Bai and local award-winning actor Faizal Hussein.
Memorable no-name characters
Intriguingly, the movie does not state the nationality of the characters played by a multinational cast, and does not even give them names except for the lead character Mrs K.
In a playful nod to the spaghetti Western The Man With No Name featuring Clint Eastwood as a mysterious character without a name, Ho said the lack of names for Mrs K's characters “works” as viewers get caught up in the action scenes.
“A lot of these people have interesting past histories and it’s more like you see what they do is more important than us knowing their names.
“I think you can, in this kind of film, you can be playful. But this film, you remember people, like even the small characters, ‘oh that guy did that’, and they can make up their names, I think it’s ok I don’t really mind,” he said.
Although dialogue in the Hong Kong and Malaysian co-produced film is predominantly in Cantonese, Ho confirmed that actors in the film also used languages commonly spoken locally — Mandarin, Bahasa Malaysia, English and Tamil.
Ho said the use of such a diverse range of languages was not intentional, but was merely to portray dialogue in a natural manner.
“No, but we just felt because they are all outsiders, so whichever works for the scene. Like the family, what would they speak? Usually (when) we speak, we mix, so we just mix it up.
“Like Kara would speak Cantonese, so she speaks to the husband in Mandarin, speaks to the daughter in Cantonese; so the daughter sometimes replies the mother in Cantonese, but replies to the father in Mandarin,” he said, adding that a character played by a local actor of Indian ethnicity even speaks Mandarin in the film.
As local award-winning actor Faizal Hussein puts it, some of the dialogue style takes after the Malaysian style of “rojak” language.
Hitting the festival circuits
Ho said Mrs K has been shown in over 10 international film festivals since last October in countries such as Korea, Japan, Italy, Australia and the US.
It was also the opening film at the 12th edition of the Osaka Asian Film Festival, where Ho said the city mayor presented Wai with the Osaka Asian Star Award for her role in the Asian film industry.
Wai also won the Lucky Cat achievement award this year at the 14th Asian Summer Film Festival in Spain where movies she starred in — Mrs K and My Young Auntie — were shown, while Mrs K’s production designer Wong Tay Sy and film editors Soo Mun Thye and Sharon Chong have been nominated for their work in the film in China's 12th Chinese Young Generation Film Forum also this year.
With Mrs K’s release in local cinemas today, Malaysia will be the first country where it will be shown to cinema-goers. It is also expected to be screened later in Hong Kong and Singapore.
Ho said: “I hope they enjoy it and tell people to go see it because it’s something they don’t usually see in a local film.”
Faizal chipped in to say: “This is a Malaysian movie but with an international standard.”
