Review of Love in the Buff

Love in the Buff (in Chinese: 春嬌與志明), is the Media Asia sequel to the 2010 smokers’ romance Love in a Puff from director Pang Ho-cheung, which saw the original leads Miriam Yeung and Shawn Yue. The film talks about two former lovers Jimmy and Cherie discover that getting over each other is not as easy as they thought in the sequel to the romantic comedy Love in a Puff. Six months after their whirlwind romance, Jimmy and Cherie are ready to move on. For Jimmy, that means moving to Beijing for a new career opportunity. As Jimmy begins dating a pretty flight attendant Shang You-you, Cherie arrives in Beijing to help with the new business of her company and catches the eye of a Malaysian Chinese I.T. specialist Sam. But after communicating in a series of texts, Jimmy and Cherie reconnect. Despite feeling that the spark is still there; however, their differences are still as pronounced as ever. As their current significant others begin to sense that something is not right, Jimmy and Cherie cannot help but feeling like maybe they were too quick to call it quits, and that perhaps there is still hope for a future together.

In the film, five months after the events in Love in a Puff, Jimmy and Cherie face more difficulties in their romantic relationship as they split up and both individually end up in Beijing as they follow their jobs to China’s capital city, and both begin new relationships there. But despite their best efforts they cannot seem to keep away from each other. Actually, there are several stereotypes shown in the film. According to Lippman (Dyer, 2000, p.244-245), stereotypes is an ordering process, a ‘short cut’, referring to ‘the world’, and expressing ‘our’ values and beliefs. Stereotypes are values that people have assigned to a certain social group. In the film, for instance, during the flight to Beijing, Jimmy and his colleague (acted by Roy Szeto) are discussing about sexually harassing flight attendants. Jimmy’s colleague is talking about how many times a man can sexually harass a flight attendant until the man gets arrested. In this case, Jimmy’s colleague seems assuming that flight attendants should be sexually harassed by men despite their attractiveness and sexual appeal. Flight attendants are being stereotyped to be sexually attractive, pretty, possessing good body shape, etc. However, do all flight attendants possess all these features and positive images? This kind of stereotype towards a specific job title or nature has been common not only for flight attendants, but also other groups like nurses, pilots, construction workers, etc.

By WONG Ka Wai, Ellis (10455745)

Reference:

Dyers, R. (2000). The Role of Stereotypes. In P. Marris & S. Thornham (eds). Media Studies: A Reader. (pp.245-251). Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press.