Paradise in Service

"Albeit its fine production value, pulchritudinous shoreline and small-town setting, the film is irrevocably marred by Niu's macho prospective in term of his treatment of female characters, mostly, the double-standard towards prostitutes and her clients, for example, Lo's abrupt cop-out of consummation with Nini on the eve of her departure smacks of a man's ingrained disparaging of a female sex worker, and a patronizing stance of preserving the purity (which is totally for his own sake instead of hers, as it is her makes the first move), and Jiao has to take her lump for acquisitiveness, but shouldn't she be smart enough to keep obvious harms at bay as a seasoned strumpet whose sole purpose of surviving is to find a way out? One can read a lot of connotations through a director's subjective options in telling the story, and in Niu's case and in hindsight, it becomes somehow telltale that he has been embroiled in sexual assault allegations since 2018 in the MeToo era, as the movie itself can bear out his own tunnel vision regarding the better sex."