Ab-Normal Beauty (DVD)

Produced by The Pang Brothers, and written and directed by Oxide Pang, Ab-Normal Beauty is typical of their style-over-substance cinematic signature, but for me it offered just a little more: a linear, easy-to-follow storyline. Don’t get me wrong, I like the Fellini and Lynch approach as much as anyone, but sometimes there is something to be said for being able to understand and follow a movie from beginning to end.

Ab-Normal Beauty follows pin-thin Jiney (Race Wong), an art student who’s bored by the traditional beauty all around her. Pictures of flowers and drawings of the human form are nice, but it’s face of death that really get her motor running. Jiney finds this out one day while she’s out and about with her ever-present camera, and a car crashes right in front of her. A body is ejected, hitting the pavement, dead and bloody. “Like the moment a photo is snapped, when someone dies everything stops,” Jiney later says (or something like that… the English captions are horrible). She finds abnormal beauty in moments of death, and is soon in a shutterbug frenzy, seeking it out.

Her lesbian lover and fellow art student, Jas (Rosanne Wong, Race’s sister), tries to accept Jiney’s strange new behavior, but eventually she takes a stand and denounces it. Jiney shuns her, and starts to go out with a boy, Anson (Anson Leung). She photographs him looking as though he’s dead… will she take her obsession a step further?

The idea of what is beautiful is presented, but not examined — for instance, skinny Jiney is just a few pounds above organ failure, but she thinks she’s “fat”; a nude model supposed to represent  the ideal natural form has obvious breast implants; and so on. The scenes of death that Jiney shoots are by turns horrible and violent, and quiet and picturesque. (A word of warning to animal lovers, though: no one is spared.)

Ab-Normal Beauty has some interesting use of color, and the composition is arty-chic without being too far removed from reality. The acting is mostly good, but it’s sometimes hard to follow the characters while contending with error-filled and often illogical English subtitles (the DVD does not offer a dubbed version). The music used for the action sequences is great, but for the dramatic and quiet moments it sounds like it came from the stock library of the Lifetime Channel.

About 3/4 of the way through the movie, a strange but not altogether unwelcome turn is taken and we get some traditional horror when Jiney is abducted by a likeminded maniac who also enjoys images of death. The narrative shift is jarring, but it worked for me (though I do prefer the first part of the movie overall).

Even though it’s not as striking or visually memorable as The Pang’s most famous horror film, The Eye, Ab-Normal Beauty is well worth watching. Seeing the brothers’ latest efforts should only serve to whet the appetite for their North American film debut, The Messengers, due out next year.

The DVD includes a making-of featurette, deleted scenes, and a photo gallery.

Note: Oxide Pang’s Ab-Normal Beauty is a companion film to his twin brother Danny Pang’s solo directing outing, Leave Me Alone (also 2005), which focuses on one of the drivers involved in the crash that Jiney witnessed.

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson