Anita Mui

September 23, 2021 8:46 PM

The biopic trailer of the Cantopop legend, a pet project of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragons producer and friend, Bill Kong.
posted by toastyk (4 comments total)

This looks good! Not entirely sure about the actress playing Anita (she looks great in the done up stage shots but in the casual clothes it's a bit uncanny, does she have an accent when speaking Cantonese? Did Anita Mui have an accent?) But it looks like it was done with love.

I was really young when she passed but I remember watching the Tribute concert/special with my parents. My mom has unearthed one of her concert DVDs recently and her stage presence was phenomenal. A lot of her music still holds up.
posted by vespertinism at 9:45 PM on September 23, 2021

I found a bit of a mini-bio of Mui, and it includes a YouTube video of the performance that launched her career. I don't think she had an accent, but she did have a very distinctive voice. Apparently it took 3 years to cast Anita's role, and it's 32 year old model Louise Wong's first acting role.

I keep wondering who they're going to have play the other icons of that era who were her good friends - who's going to play Leslie Cheung and all the other stars she mentored?

I found one of her concerts on YouTube, and I'm sure there's more if you want to look.
posted by toastyk at 7:20 AM on September 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

Thanks for posting this toastyk! I'm super looking forward to this.

Speaking of Leslie Cheung, I thought I saw someone who looked a little like him in the trailer; I wonder if/ how much the Chinese government interfered/ "consulted" with this project?

Louise Wong's resemblance is certainly pretty good, but Mui's look was very distinctive.

Gonna go re-watch a bunch of Mui movies this weekend.
posted by porpoise at 9:18 PM on September 24, 2021

A production interview posted on YouTube yesterday. From both the trailer and this video, I've definitely felt a sense or subtext of, this is the Hong Kong that I knew as a young kid, the way the city looked and felt pre-handover, and I bet a lot of my family relatives would probably feel nostalgic seeing aspects of that in the film, especially magnified by the contrasting of contexts of today's post-protest HK dealing with both COVID-19 and CCP oppression.
posted by polymodus at 1:37 AM on September 30, 2021 [2 favorites]