Girlfriends review: Tracy Choi's queer Macau triptych is uneven and worth seeing

Girlfriends (女孩不平凡)Dir. Tracy Choi Ian-sin | Macau/Hong Kong | 2024Queer East Film Festival (UK Premiere)

When we first meet Lok, she is in a Hong Kong apartment that should feel like an arrival and instead feels like a waiting room. There is a first film behind her and a second that will not come, a partner who wants to start a family, and a life that has the shape of something settled without quite being settled. Tracy Choi Ian-sin's Girlfriends begins here, in that particular stasis, and then moves backward through time to find out how it started.

The film is a semi-autobiographical triptych, following one woman across three stages of life, played by three different actors. Fish Liew Chi-yu plays Lok in Hong Kong, where her partner Bei Bei, played by Jennifer Yu Heung-ying with a lightness that never tips into naivety, wants more than Lok can give. Before that comes Taiwan, university years, orange hair, the specific freedom of someone who has been let loose without knowing what they want. And before that, Macau: a gifted student with certificates on every wall, trying to say something true to someone who will not receive it.

The reverse structure is deliberate, and it is where the film runs into trouble. Choi is reaching for something Peppermint Candy understood: that a life looks different when you already know where it ends up. But reverse chronology only earns its mystery when the opening plants something the audience urgently needs to understand. Girlfriends plants yearning rather than mystery, and the gap between adult Lok and her university-age self remains the film's most frustrating omission. How this person became that one is exactly what the story needs to show.

What survives is the performing. Tang Tao won Best Supporting Actress on the festival circuit and you can see why: the university section carries an intensity the rest of the film only approaches. Natalie Hsu's earlier chapter is the most quietly complete of the three, a portrait of longing that does not need to explain itself. Liew grounds the adult sequences with a restraint that feels earned rather than withheld.

The Macau of the film, where Portuguese tiles and casino light sit alongside the quiet condition of creative stagnation, is present but not quite inhabited. Choi is more interested in interiority than in place, and on that territory the film is often genuinely affecting.

Girlfriends is uneven, and it knows it. The parts that work are real, and the cast makes them land. You leave thinking about the Taipei section, about Tang Tao's performance in particular, and wondering what the film might have been with a different shape around it.

Writer & Director: Tracy Choi Ian-sin

Cast: Fish Liew Chi-yu, Jennifer Yu Heung-ying, Tang Tao, Natalie Hsu

Running time: 101 mins

Festival: Queer East Film Festival (UK Premiere, 12 May 2026, Barbican Centre)

Rating: 4/5

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