Yu Kuan Jen’s Woman Of The Night (1973) is an erotic triptych produced and released by Shaw Brothers Studio. Though best known for their kung-fu pictures the Shaw Brothers Studio also dabbled in a number of other sensationalist genres. Woman Of The Night was produced around the time that the studio began to face stiff competition in the form of Golden Harvest. As far as the Shaw Brothers Studio was concerned Woman Of The Night, with its three episodes, had something for everybody.
The first segment combines elements of the crime film with the sexploitation genre. This episode opens with Su Xiao-qi (Margaret Hsing Hui) reproaching her mother for working as a prostitute. She then has a montage of flashbacks to when she was a little girl playing with her now estranged father. This montage culminates with her father being castrated by buck shot that was accidentally fired by a hunter. Her father divorces her mother and she finds herself in the situation that she’s in now. From here she seeks out her dad, gets kidnapped and then liberated when her mother murders her abductor.
The first episode is highly melodramatic. The photography throughout Woman Of The Night is gorgeous but its very design is expressionistic which, when combined with the writing and acting, becomes operatic. When Su Xiao-qi insults her moth the camera does a quick zoom in on her mother’s expression. These kinds of tactics run throughout the film but in this first episode Yu Kuan Jen clearly wishes the audience to take these choices seriously.
The second episode on the other hand uses the same strategies but to comedic effect. The story of a businessman who has become sexually obsessed with his secretary is rendered like a Saturday morning cartoon. Kinks are played for laughs and all of the performers in this segment approach their roles with a strong dose of irony. The effect that this episode has on the preceding narrative is one of total subversion that actually works quite well.
Woman Of The Night runs into a little trouble with its third and final installment which attempts to balance the tonal variations of the first two episodes within one segment. The story of a pepping tom (Huang Hsi Tien) begins like a bawdy frat comedy and ends as a sincere melodrama. The shift occurs abruptly about halfway through when the peeping tom assaults his neighbor and is executed with absolutely no grace or sensitivity. In some ways this balancing act of tonality makes this last vignette the most ambitious. However Yu Kuan Jen is unable to successfully direct this piece so as to make it feel cohesive on its own or as part of his erotic triptych.
Woman Of The Night, with its serious pretensions and ambitious formalism, is anomalous as both a Shaw Brothers release and as a Yu Kuan Jen film. A year after the release of Woman Of The Night Yu Kuan Jen directed Bamboo Brotherhood (1974); a cookie-cutter example of the martial arts films of this period. Woman Of The Night remains Yu Kuan Jen’s sole outing as a writer and director.
