Woman Forty is a 1995 Hong Kong film directed and produced by Hui Anhua.
The film won six awards at the 15th Hong Kong Film Awards, including Best Film and Best Director, and was the first film to achieve a Grand Slam at the Hong Kong Film Awards (i.e. the same film is also included in best film, best director, best screenwriter and best actor and actress). Subsequently, at the 32nd Golden Horse Awards, it won five awards such as Best Feature Film. She also won the Silver Bear For Best Actress (Siu Fong Fong) and the Christian Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. In 2005, it was voted one of the "100 Best Chinese Films" by the Hong Kong Film Awards Association.
The film focuses on how a typical working woman in Hong Kong struggles with a balance between family and career. The focus of the story is the heroine of the play, Ah E, after the unexpected death of her mother-in-law, and her father-in-law who suffers from Alzheimer's disease.
Ah E (Siu Fong Fong Fong) is a senior employee of a toilet paper company and lives in an old house with her husband (Lo Ka Ying) and her only son Ding Yi (Ding Zi Jun), who is a driver's license test proctor. Downstairs is where the father-in-law (Qiao Hong) and mother-in-law (Tan Qianhong) live.
Ah E is meticulous and capable (from the beginning of buying fish in the wet market and later having to take a taxi driver to turn around the road can be seen), but her relationship with her father-in-law is not very good, because the father-in-law is macho, temperamental, and each other's words and deeds are not good. But the mother-in-law cares about A'e everywhere, and it is also very good to treat A'e, on A'e's birthday, the in-laws and in-laws come to eat together, and the mother-in-law also specially burned fresh shrimp to give to the daughter-in-law to eat. The relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law is very good, but it is always due to the father-in-law and things are a lot of trouble.
One day the father-in-law ran with the bread to the side of A'e who was touching the neighbors twice, asking her to help him open the bread package, A'e thought that the father-in-law was ugly to her in front of the neighbors, and he returned home with a large bag in a rage, only to accidentally find that the mother-in-law was lying in a coma at home, and before notifying the ambulance to come, the mother-in-law had passed away. At the funeral of his mother-in-law, the father-in-law did not recognize his wife and biological children, but only recognized the sister-in-law (Cantonese "daughter-in-law") A'e. Later, Ah E took her father-in-law to the hospital for examination and confirmed that she was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Although the father-in-law has two sons and a daughter, the second daughter-in-law refuses to take her sick father to live at home, and the daughter (Luo Guanlan) also wants to return to the United States (Taiwanese version is Taipei), so the father-in-law has to live in the eldest son's home.
In addition to the father-in-law's sudden stay at home and makes A'e feel very sad, a new person in the company, Isabella Au, young and beautiful, has introduced some new ideas, such as using a computer to process the company's complicated orders and inventory, and a stunning posture that makes the boss and some shareholders amazing. Ah E, who was originally admired by the boss, could not help but feel lost after all these things.
In the eldest son's home, the father-in-law often wandered around, and he once shouted, and even jumped from the roof with a black umbrella that was stretched open as a parachute, which really annoyed the eldest son and A'e who had to go to work, so they began to look for a nursing home so that the father-in-law could be taken care of without hindering the family of three from going to work and school. At first, the two found an old people's home with day care services for their father-in-law, but later because the father-in-law left the nursing home by himself, he was asked to leave the hospital by the director in charge of the hospital on the grounds that he did not accept the inertia to leave the elderly to join. Later, another nursing home was found, but soon after the father-in-law was admitted to the hospital, When Ah E went to visit the nursing home, she found that her father-in-law's face was bruised and injured, and the people in the hospital casually replied that he had injured himself, so Ah E immediately took her father-in-law home.
Although his father-in-law suffers from Alzheimer's disease, he has not forgotten his experience and identity in participating in the Air Force War of Resistance. Before the eldest son's family took their father-in-law to the nursing home, during lunch at a restaurant where the mother-in-law said that the father-in-law loved to go, his grandson learned of the heroic deeds of his grandfather in the war against Japan by flying a fighter plane and how to save the life of the restaurant owner, and the grandson discovered how the grandfather had been beautiful.
The father-in-law, the eldest son's family and daughter went to the wild farm to experience the joy of farming. At first, the father-in-law only recognized Ah E, but on the farm, he not only picked flowers for Ah E, but also recognized and picked flowers for his daughter. Unfortunately, when the father-in-law picked the flowers again, he suddenly had a sly pain in his chest and fainted and died. The plot is coming to an end.
In the end, Ah E unexpectedly walked up to the roof, but found a flock of pigeons on the roof floor, and the father-in-law, after staying at Ah E's house due to illness, once said that he saw a whole group of pigeons on the roof, but he was not believed. Ah E took off her slippers, slowly approached the group of pigeons that were busy pecking at the grains of rice, and called out to the roof to see this spectacle that was originally regarded as crazy talk but was real.