Maybe It's Love

Following her parent's separation, 10 year-old Marbles is sent to live with her grandmother in the outskirts of Hong Kong. Also new to town is the seductive pageant queen Rita (Cherie Chung) whose skin-tight leotards pique the interest of a dashing postman (Kent Tong) already involved with the shopkeeper's wife, Lin (Elaine Jin). Meanwhile, the curious Marbles, who has made it a habit of spying on her neighbours with her binoculars, witnesses a murder on a stormy night. A ragtag team of kid detectives comes together. Who is the killer? Where is the body?

Angie Chen, the first female director at Shaw Brothers Studio, began her career with a rich and unclassifiable ensemble film: part comedy of manners à la Shaw, part Nancy Drew-esque nod to Hitchcock’s Rear Window — all of which was marketed by the studio as an erotic whodunnit. Chen's film unfolds as all these things and more: a self-aware portrait of a small-town mentality and community, fore-fronting the interconnected lives of women whose tenacity would become a major theme of Chen's work, developed further in My Name Ain’t Suzie (1985).