“Butterfly” was chosen as the Opening Film at Venice Film Festival Critics Week and Yuan Tian was awarded as Best New Artist at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2005. The film was also nominated at the Taiwan Golden Horse Awards In 2004 for Best Adapted Screenplay (Director/Writer, Yan Yan Mak) and Best New Performer (Yuan Tian). The main actress Josie Ho, received a nomination at the Golden Bauhinia Awards for Best Actress and at ILMA Awards for Best Leading Actress, both in 2005.
Butterfly is screening at Five Flavours
As a schoolteacher, Flavia (Josie Ho) meets Yip (Yuan Tian), a young and free-spirited singer. As she reminisces about her past as a closeted lesbian, she feels strongly attracted to Yip and must decide whether to be true to herself. Growing up with an emotionally needy and unstable mother, Flavia found solace with her schoolmate Jin (Stephanie Che), fell in love, and moved in with her. Due to the unrest of society at that time, the relationship did not last, ultimately leading to Jin seeking a celibate life as a monk.
The plot is told in a non-linear form by showing the audience the pieces of the puzzle before allowing them to piece the narrative together. It sets the mood with Flavia's current life as a high school teacher in an all-girls school. Then the meet-cute sets in when she bumps into a distressed Yip at the supermarket, who is caught eating unpaid merchandise. A revelation then sets in that Yip might have done it to catch the attention of Flavia, hoping to strike up a conversation and a date with her. The pair grow closer, perhaps with the reason being that Yip reminded Flavia of her former high school romance with a lesbian schoolmate Jin, who was not only her best friend but also her girlfriend at one point in time.
But Flavia (surprisingly), led a hetero life after her relationship with Jin ended. She is not only married but also has a baby. Meeting and falling for Yip, makes Flavia reconsider her life choices. The plot constantly jumps between her memories with Jin and thoughts about her current relationship with Yip. What makes the story painfully slow is a passive protagonist constantly deliberating her life choices.
The creepy 2000s music that punctuates Flavia's memories with Jin, has a pattern of fading in during a happy memory, setting a visually jovial mood with an ominous audio. It gives off a weird vibe together with random super 8 filter cuts – which perhaps are meant to symbolise the specific frames etched into Flavia's heart.
During Flavia's youth, presumably in the early 90s, students were seen protesting the handover of Hong Kong to China. Jin, who was part of the protest, was seen filming it with a super 8 camera. So perhaps Flavia has remembered her memories akin to a film camera storing footage, which explains the random burst of cuts into the filter. Which also symbolises that she can never forget her memories with Jin.
The initial coloration of the film is consistent and predictable; happy moments with Jin or Yip are coloured in bright and warm tones, while the scenes with her husband seemed duller and bluer. A good indicator of how she felt about her life. There was even a short part of the story where she tries to focus on her life with her husband and baby and it is brightly lighted and colourfully set.
Throughout the story, the parallels between how she initially feels when being with Jin is repeated with Yip- first with their handwritten notes, then of their first kisses; it didn't take long for Flavia to see the script being rewritten the same way once again. Only Flavia has more to lose now and must contemplate ending things with Yip.
In essence, “Butterfly” is a slow burner, with certain nice edits by intercutting parallel scenes from the past to the present. However, the story plays out awfully slowly and has more than just a few corny technicalities, like the dated usage of sepia to represent memories and sudden zooms serving no purpose.
