In recent years, there have been a number of movies scheduled for a January release that have been shown in the theatre for a day before the actual New Year. For example, there was SHU Kei's "A Queer Story" and last year Fruit CHAN's "The Longest Summer." Now we have "A Dumb Boy" and "Little Cheung." The main purpose for such an arrangement is to allow a movie to qualify for the up-coming Film Awards, the rules of which require that a movie to be shown at least a day in a theatre during 1999.

Following "A True Mob Story," "A Dumb Boy" is another drama from WONG Jing. The story concerns Mrs. FAT (Deanie IP Tak-han), a women whose husband (KO Shau-leung) is in prison while she cares for a mentally-disabled boy, Bee (Patrick TAM Yiu-man). Mrs. FAT is suffering from the final stage of lung cancer. As the title character, Bee is always being treated badly by his neighbors. One day, he finds that he is in love with May (Shooky KWAN Sau-mei), but May and her triad friend paint Bee's penis. Aware that she will die soon, Mrs. FAT worries about what will happen to Bee since he does not seem able to care for himself . . .

The main selling point of "A Dumb Boy" is Deanie IP who has just won in the best actress category at the recent Taiwan Golden Horse Awards. In addition, after playing a series of bad guys, Patrick TAM Yiu-man is trying to change his image.

Plot-wise "A Dumb Boy" is smooth but not outstanding. The first half of the story focuses on Mrs. FAT while the latter half of the story is about the relationship between Bee, May, and Mr. FAT. The storytelling is smooth enough to make the movie comfortable to watch. However, "A Dumb Boy" is too overt in its desire to create a climate of tragedy. The music score used during some key scenes is artificial. In addition, the use of a thunderstorm to show the tragic nature of Mrs. FAT's position is also all too obvious. WONG Jing has intended to make the drama impressive, and in this he has done well. However, the audience would be impressed more if he had made the story a bit lighter at the beginning. Any successful drama needs some comic relief, especially at the beginning of its story. WONG Jing attempts this, but he could have gone further.

On the positive side, WONG Jing allows the different characters adequate and proportional screen time in the movie. Mrs. FAT is the main character of the movie and a tragic one. First, she knows that she will die soon. Second, she has to take good care of Bee and protect him from the discrimination of the public. Third, she has to find a person to take care of Bee. Deanie has done an excellent job in portraying this character. Her performance in the scene during which she instructs Bee not to play with May is quite impressive.

Patrick TAM Yiu-man portrays "the dumb boy" Bee in the movie. Although this type of character is not entirely new to him (see Andrew LAU's "The Legend of Speed" (1999)), he has more opportunity to act here. His performance is also good. Patrick is proving that he can act in other kinds of movies. However, perhaps the greatest surprise of the movie comes from Shooky KWAN Sau-mei during the second half of the movie. Shooky has been in show business as "the troubled woman." Here she succeeds in changing her image.

In short, though the plot of "A Dumb Boy" is not outstanding, it is smooth with a terrific performance by Deanie IP. The performances of Patrick TAM and Shooky KWAN are also good enough to make this film worth your time.

Written by Ryan Law, from Hong Kong Movie DataBase, on 29 December 1999.