While strange to think of these two together but I did for a moment while reading an interview with Josie Ho in HK-online in which she was quoted as saying:
"I have so much energy… maybe that’s why I have so much anger.
Now that I’m older, I get even angrier.
I feel there are more forces obstructing me."
(HK-online apparently doesn't bother printing the questions in interviews)
The idea of Josie Ho having to deal with forces obstructing her, while real enough to her, is hard to fathom given her material/social/class advantages over 99.9% of the population of Hong Kong--and maybe the rest of the world. However she presents herself in an interview, she is still a terrifically talented and committed actress who is often riveting onscreen.
A good example of this is Johnny To's crime drama Exiled in which she plays the perfect Triad wife trying to keep her husband alive during the last hours of Portuguese rule in Macau. This is not a review of Exiled--there are plenty of reviews--but a quick look at Josie Ho's role in it as the only person who is neither a killer nor someone who profits from killing.
Her husband, played by Nick Cheung, is returning from overseas in an attempt to pack up his family and get them somewhere safe. Anthony Wong and Lam Suet are waiting to kill him while Francis Ng and Roy Cheung are there to thwart the killers. None of them is as committed as Josie Ho.
She is waiting with their child in the sun-drenched tropical outpost for her husband to arrive:
She understands the difficulties of being the wife of a gangster, one of them being the chance that armed men may shoot up the apartment trying to kill each other while some of them also try to kill her husband. In an amazing sequence we see her through a doorway with the gun battle at its height. She goes to her child's crib, picks him up and allows him to nurse--something has to be normal during this day of the world turned upside down:
Even after the gunfight she remains a proper hostess, bringing the men pillows and blankets so they can bed down in the living room while keeping watch on each other and her husband--and asking, almost casually, that she and her family be allowed to live:
There will have to be some serious blood spilled, of course, although the four gangsters have allied with each other and with her husband to rip off a huge shipment of gold being shipped out as the Portuguese leave their colony on the edge of Asia to return to the edge of Europe. Nick Cheung has to die and die he does. A chance to emigrate with more gold than she can carry doesn't balance her new widowhood as she shows the other side of being a Triad wife:
She not only shoots at the fleeing gunmen but decides that the only thing to do is strap her baby across her chest, put the huge revolver in her purse and hunt down the foursome she holds responsible, going from hotel to hotel with a photograph of the four of them plus her husband when they were much younger, good friends growing up in Macau:
Inevitably she arrives at the hotel that is the headquarters of the evil boss behind the evening's bloodshed. He is played by Simon Yam, so the roster of cool dude tough guy actors in "Exiled" is very deep. There isn't much for her to do at this point other than to listen while Francis Ng tells her where to go to find the gold and a boat waiting to sail on the morning tide:
HK-online through dleedlee.
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