Love in the Buff screenwriter Luk Yee-sum aspires to normalize the conversation around young, female sexuality through a recognition that, as with any other interaction, the healthiest self-expression is one of honesty. The three teens sharing a Hong Kong apartment in Luk’s directing debut, Lazy, Hazy, Crazy, struggle with this truth, and their denial manifests itself in needling jealousies and quiet resentments. Alice (Fish Lieu) was left with no parents and an apartment to make rent on from a young age; she’s comfortable with her “part-time job” as a sex worker, as is her friend Chloe (Mak Tsz-yi), who’s newer to the business and who welcomes WeChat picture-posting advice from her more experienced peer.
Chloe’s best friend, Tracy (Kwok Yik-sum), is the outlier of this group: she’s a virgin who’s made noticeably uncomfortable by her friends’ frank displays of sexuality, while at the same time she feels envious of the agency it affords them. Tracy has a crush on a cute basketball player at school, but the boy’s attentions are more often won by her two outgoing and flirtatious friends. Tracy’s personal frustrations push her to experiment past comfort, causing an upset in the three girls’ interpersonal dynamic that leads each of them to a consideration of their own relationship to sexuality. That turning point steers Lazy, Hazy, Crazy away from pure sex-positive advocacy, but it also allows for the film to take on a sense of maturity: Luk neither judges nor makes insinuations as to a proper behavior, instead letting his characters each decide what’s right for them. Likewise, Luk’s film is unbound to any one means of expression—by turns sexy and sad, confident and confused, Lazy, Hazy, Crazy is a fittingly fluid evocation of youth.
Published as part of New York Asian Film Festival 2016.
