Girlfriends review – love and growing pains in queer coming-of-age tale that goes from Hong Kong to Taiwan

It can stretch credibility a little when an actor plays the same character over a long time span in one film. Richard Linklater solved the problem in Boyhood by shooting scenes over succeeding years; AI and de-ageing effects are now an option. With this intimate queer coming-of-age drama, film-maker Tracy Choi instead casts a trio of actors to play one woman from high school to her mid-30s. The three don’t look particularly alike; their temperaments overlap but are by no means identical. The point is perhaps to show how intense the transitions into adulthood are, how unrecognisable are the people we used to be.

Working backwards, Girlfriends begins in Hong Kong, where 34-year-old film director Lok (Fish Liew) lives with her actor girlfriend Bei (Jennifer Yu). Five years earlier, Choi released a feature film, but her career has stalled. She is directionless and restless. Bei is also applying pressure to buy a flat and have a baby. The film then rewinds 12 years, to Taiwan, when Lok was a student with spiky orange hair, known as Choi (played by Elizabeth Tang). Some of the best scenes in the film come when her parents visit from Macau; Choi and her girlfriend Qing (Han Ning) have been pretending to be flatmates. Then, as the four of them eat dinner one night, unwilling to keep up the charade, Choi grabs Qing’s hand fiercely over the dinner table. She is coming out to her parents; they understand but say nothing. Another film might give us a big showdown, but this is probably how it would have happened in real life.

The film is full of natural-feeling moments like this, though some of its carefully observed, thoughtful scenes meander a little. Girlfriends is romantic too – with sex scenes that don’t feel icky. In the final section in Macau, played by Natalie Hsu, Lok is 17 and falling head over heels for her first love. It’s an interesting film but not perfect.