In having a female protagonist, Pang touches on such subjects as sexual abuse, real and false memories, voyeurism and the objectification of women, without direct comment. Not only is Pang's protagonist, Jiney, a stand-in for the viewer who is fascinated with artistic representations of death, such as horror movies, but Pang plays with the audience by having a scene where Jiney is videotaped by an unknown person while she is in the act of photographing a woman falling from a building. By extension, Pang is exploring the difference, or lack of difference, between an artist like Joel-Peter Witkin or Oxide Pang, with the creators and consumers of images that may be more arguably exploitive.

My attempts to translate the Chinese title with Babelfish have failed, but the English language title is worth commenting on. Ab-normal Beauty works as a double entendre. Jiney could be considered abnormal based on her interest in photographing scenes of death, as well as her persistent trauma from sexual abuse at a young age and ambivalent sexual orientation. The photographs created for the film, like the photographs refered to by Witkin and Weegee, are simultaneously brutal and beautiful, a distance from the more traditional "beauty" of nature photographs. Maybe I'm stretching here, but because of the hyphenated title, I wonder if this is a play on AB blood, or even the A and B rolls of films.

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Ab-normal Beauty was available through the web rental outlet Nicheflix. Fellow film blogger Girish wanted to know more about Nicheflix and my experience with this company.

My overall experience with Nicheflix is that they are pretty good. They specialize in films that are not available through U.S. sources. If you have a code free DVD player, you can view anything they offer. For those who are limited to Region 1 DVDs, many of the DVDs from outside the U.S. are NTSC Region 1 or 0. While there are some duplications of titles with Netflix, I have been able to see films I might not have been able to enjoy otherwise, and saved substantially by not purchasing titles of interest.

The downsides to Nicheflix are relatively minor. As this is a small company based in Indiana, the gap between receiving films and sending them back is several days. The selection of titles seems abitrary. I have a queue list of about one hundred films, yet I can always name other titles only available as imports that Nicheflix does not carry.

These negatives are minor when one considers some of the films I have been able to see like Gumnaam, the Bollywood musical thriller best known for the excerpt shown in Ghost World, the Italian classic Bitter Rice, and several films by Cedric Klapisch and Marco Bellochio. All in all, I'm glad I stumbled upon Nicheflix when I was Googling for a now forgotten title one night.