Speech of Silence

Year: 2008
Theme Song: "Jik Gok" (Intuition) - Joyce Cheng
No. of episodes: 20

Cast
Kenneth Ma
Kate Tsui
Kingdom Yuen
Lau Dan
Matthew Ko
Elaine Yiu
Chris Lai

Review

TVB continues its downward spiral in 2008 (the first step being the dreaded Moonlight Resonance) with The Speech of Silence. Casting the consistency-challenged Kate Tsui and charismatically-challenged Kenneth Ma as leads was not exactly getting off on a good footing for this series. The story is well-intentioned (people with disabilities can find love and career) but wow, the execution was terrible.

Speech is stuck in the TVB tradition of not knowing what genre it belongs to. The writers should have made it a full-on drama about Tong Tong’s dilemma and OK’s reunion with his father and just avoided all the cartoonish people/subplots of the other voice dubbers in the company.

This is the second lead performance that I’ve watched Kenneth in and this guy is getting more boring by the minute. He can act, but if he couldn’t, I wouldn’t care much either because with his lack of screen presence, it’s like I see right through him on the TV screen. Maybe TVB needs to put him back on ke-le-fe status and he can excel there like so many other actors, because he just doesn’t have what it takes to shoulder a series. Here he has chemistry with Kate and they look like a couple, but he is a major yawn to watch without the more charismatic actors in his scenes.

Kate is just a big question mark for me. I’ve seen almost every single one of her series since her debut in La Femme Desperado, but admittedly I think I am confusing her off-screen spunk and personality with onscreen acting. Her thing is good “moments” in her acting, but put all her scenes together and one can easily spot the inconsistencies. One easy one that made me cringe and conclude once and for all that this girl definitely needs improvement: in the last episode when Tong Tong has become completely deaf, her head is turned away from Claire’s character’s son (and therefore can’t read his lips), but Kate quickly responded when the son said something while her head was still turned in the opposite direction. This makes no sense, Tong Tong would have had to turn her head towards the son to be able to read his lips and therefore respond that quickly. It’s small things like this where Kate’s acting requires serious improvement. Compared to other actors who’ve taken on characters with disabilities (Yuko Fueki, Julian Cheung, and Fala Chen), Kate’s performance here is a major miss. Despite the problems, I was relatively ok watching her in this girlier, more timid role, which is such a diversion from her real-life personality and image. Oddly enough, Kate has said in an interview that Tong Tong was her favourite character to play so far to date because she was given a chance to show her “inner emotions”. Those moments are there in the performance, but you’ll have to look pretty hard for them.

Kingdom Yuen is wasted here, but the ke-le-fes who play the other voice dubbers do well enough (minus the super-dull dude who plays Kingdom’s love interest). Lau Dan is dependably good, and Claire Yiu continues to deliver in her secondary role status; I’m never dissatisfied with her performances though I don’t think she can ever lead a series. Chris Lai is fine as the silly, low-class “Shrimp Noodle”, and Elaine Yiu continues to annoy.

The one saving grace of this series is the theme song. Finally, a beautiful TVB song sung by someone who is actually meant to sing. Joyce Cheng is a new talent to be reckoned with. And the lyrics are, for once and unlike 99% of recent TVB theme songs, quite poetic.