Starring Zhou Xun. Rated PG. In Mandarin, with English subtitles.

I really want to believe that Women Who Flirt is the subversive farce about gender expectations in modern China it seems to think it is. But between the poo and “retard” jokes, its scattershot plotting, and incomprehensibly cloddish behaviour of everyone involved, that’s a pretty tough sell.

Basically, this is just a bunch of attractive young performers barely established as credible human characters before being force-fed into a storytelling Cuisinart that only has one button.

The romantic farce, which also features a jazzy score and poverty-free images of China and Taiwan, relies on Cloud Atlas’s charming Zhou Xun, a singer and award-grabbing actor almost versatile enough to pull off the thankless part of Angie, a Shanghai restaurant consultant (or something) in love with a long-time colleague who sees her as one of the guys. Called Marco (in the sometimes unreliable subtitles, anyway), he’s played by handsome Huang Xao Ming, veteran of imports like The Last Tycoon and Ip Man 2.

As glimpsed in repetitive flashbacks, Angie and Marco went to the same college, where they developed their sparring platonic banter. They’ve been in the friend zone ever since, but she is shocked—shocked, I tell you—when he returns from Taipei with his new girlfriend (Together’s Sonia Sui) in tow.

Angie’s gal pals are the usual assemblage of unlikely opposites favoured by neophyte directors (like Pang Ho-Cheung) who’ve seen too many episodes of Sex and the City. Simply because Angie wears her hair in a pixie cut and doesn’t use a squeaky-baby voice, her crew (including memorable Xie Yi Lin) is sure she’s just not girly enough to compete—not that it ever came up before—and so they set out to train her in the fine art of being a manipulative phony.

Apart from its inevitability, the blandly titled film’s big finish is genuinely weird, carrying the implication that guys who like their women real are somehow of indeterminate sexuality. “Women hold up half the sky,” as Mao Zedong famously said. And he didn’t mention anything about it having to be pink.