Quai D’Orsay (2013)

Anyone who’s been confounded by bureaucracy at work will know that it’s no laughing matter. Indeed, it can be the most frustrating thing in the world when an obvious solution presents itself, but red tape or bungling co-workers insist on getting in the way. It’s a lot funnier when someone else is suffering the quiet ignominy of office politics, however, as evidenced by sparkling – if occasionally tedious – French political farce Quai D’Orsay (The French Minister).

The last thing Arthur Vlaminck (Raphaël Personnaz) expects is to get a phone call summoning him to an interview at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (known colloquially as Quai D’Orsay due to its location on the left bank of the Seine). He meets Minister Alexandre Taillard de Worms (Thierry Lhermitte) in a whirlwind interview, and is sufficiently impressed to agree to join the ministry as a speechwriter. As he meets his new co-workers, including the Minister’s long-suffering chief-of-staff, Claude (Niels Arestrup), Arthur begins to realise that his boss’ public persona might not quite reflect his private concerns or capabilities.

Anyone anticipating a grave, serious-minded look at the intricacies of French diplomacy should take note – Quai D’Orsay is really a raucous workplace comedy that happens to take place in the hallowed halls of the French Foreign Ministry. It’s not that foreign affairs and public policy don’t feature – they do. There’s a ring of veracity to the proceedings, likely due to the fact that the film is based on the eponymous comic book by Antonin Baudry, which recounts his own experiences as a speechwriter for real-life Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin.

But the emphasis here is firmly on the comedy of the situation. Arthur’s optimism begins to fade as he’s plunged into workaday reality, much of which involves the minister’s staff frantically fixing problems while he storms around in the background and screams truisms lifted wholesale from Greek philosopher Heraclitus. There’s something almost tragic to Arthur’s increasingly desperate attempts to write the perfect speech for Taillard de Worms – it goes through several iterations, the focus shifting (oftentimes nonsensically) as the minister’s moods dance, sway and waltz away with logic and good sense. At every turn, Claude is frustrated in his noble efforts to ward off a crisis in Lousdemistan – a surrogate for Iraq – by bickering colleagues and the fretful fluttering of his foolish boss.

The film is constructed firmly around Lhermitte’s breathless and, ultimately, breathtaking performance. Taillard de Worms is a character who is, in effect, a human hurricane: he literally churns up paper flurries (and thereby makes a mess) whenever he enters a room, flinging out pompous statements in jogging shorts or dragging down a meeting with non sequiturs. A lesser actor would not have been able to play the minister’s curious blend of insanity and incompetence – one which somehow works just well enough to make it credible that this character is somehow still in power. But Lhermitte does so with flair to spare, whether Taillard de Worms is obsessively speechifying about the importance of yellow highlighters or terrorising a Nobel Laureate at lunch.

While the film largely works quite well as a farce, Quai D’Orsay suffers somewhat in its editing. After a point, Arthur’s travails and his encounters with Taillard de Worms grow repetitive and even tedious, particularly when the film nears the two-hour mark. That could be partly the point – imagine what it must really be like to live and work with someone like Taillard de Worms day after crazy day – but there’s really only so much bumbling incompetence one can take before the comedy becomes a tragedy. Tavernier’s film is smart and savvy in its satire but, like its main character, starts to grate on one’s nerves the longer it belabours the same point.

Basically: A sparkling, if occasionally forced, farce anchored by a larger-than-life central performance.

The Crossing 太平轮: 乱世浮生 (2014)

Almost twenty years after James Cameron’s Titanic broke cineplexes with its combination of blockbuster spectacle and heartrending emotion, John Woo is hoping to do the same with The Crossing. Based on the real-life sinking of a Taiwan-bound steamer that claimed 1,500 lives (approximately the same number lost aboard the RMS Titanic), Woo’s latest epic boasts three times the romance and, one would think, three times the heartbreak and drama. In theory, anyway. In actuality, splitting the movie into two means that there’s no sign of the titular journey in this first installment of The Crossing – for that, you’ll have to wait for the sequel, due in cinemas in May 2015.  What you do get is plenty of occasionally soggy backstory for the film’s three star-crossed couples, as they meet and fall in love against a backdrop of world and civil war.

In the midst of World War II, General Lei Yifang (Huang Xiaoming) bravely commands his troops against the Japanese, while signaller Tong Daqing (Tong Dawei) captures Yan Zekun (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a Taiwanese doctor conscripted into the Japanese army. When the war ends, each man finds love: Yifang marries heiress Zhou Yunfen (Song Hye-Kyo); Daqing forms an unexpected connection with nurse Yuzhen (Zhang Ziyi), a complete stranger who plays his wife in a family photo so he can get more rations; and Zekun pines after Noriko (Masami Nagasawa), his sweetheart who has since been repatriated to Japan. But their lives change again when the civil war erupts: suddenly, the men are called back into battle, to fight against people they fought with and for just a few years ago.

There’s no denying it – at its worst, Woo’s film plays like two hours of filler. It meanders in episodic bursts through the lives of these six characters, never quite making a convincing argument for its existence. We know it’s meant to create emotional stakes for the sequel, but a great deal of the drama that unfolds in this film could be condensed by a canny screenwriter into a few minutes of narrative context.

It doesn’t help that Woo doesn’t fully deliver on either the military or the romantic aspects of the film. The opening battle feels like it was shot a few decades ago: the blood splatters are gory and unrealistic, while the action beats disappear amidst the carnage – the last thing you’d expect from a Woo movie. It recalls Michael Bay at his most boom-tastic, which isn’t really a compliment. The relationships play out in stilted, somewhat soggy fashion, told as much through voiceover as actual interaction: a barefoot Yunfen somehow waltzes away with Yifang’s heart, Zekun must hastily disguise his sketches of Noriko’s eyes during an art class, and Daqing pays his fake wife in noodles that aren’t salty enough for his taste.

And yet, this installment of The Crossing is not entirely without merit. Stick with it long enough, and some of its scattered episodes and ideas will prove more affecting than you’d expect. This comes primarily from Woo’s surprisingly even-handed treatment of the civil war that breaks out within China: neither side is villified; indeed, we’re shown what happens when brothers-in-arms find themselves returning to war on opposite sides. There are moments of quiet comedy – three starving soldiers find a rabbit in the woods – and others of devastating betrayal, when true allegiances are revealed. For a big-budget release clearly targeting the Chinese market, it’s interesting that Woo doesn’t downplay that element of Taiwanese resistance, instead folding the people, their language and their strength into the film.

Woo’s all-star cast is competent, but not quite strong enough to save The Crossing when it’s determined to, well, sink. Zhang is blessed with the meatiest role. It may be predictable – poor, illiterate nurse struggles to earn enough money to buy a ticket to Taiwan to find her true love – but she imbues it with plenty of grit and desperation. Tong treads a fine line between comedy and tragedy as Daqing, shifting from comic relief to unexpected war hero as circumstances spin out of everyone’s control.

The other actors fare less well. Kaneshiro and Nagasawa are little more than an afterthought, turning up briefly and thus far inconsequentially throughout the film, while Huang and Song are saddled with the most dismally boring of  love stories. The former, so charming in other movies, has apparently decided to play his role with an arrogant sneer almost permanently stuck to his face, which can make for somewhat disconcerting viewing.

There are, of course, financial reasons galore for Woo to split his epic into two films. But are there any creative ones? It’s possible to charitably grant him and his producers the benefit of the doubt – there’s nothing wrong, per se, in dedicating an entire film to building up to an event that will only take place in the sequel. But it’s hard to believe that box-office considerations didn’t play a part when the final product is less hit than miss, a bundle of moments strung together with little subtlety and not enough care. The first installment in a franchise should leave you hungering for more – The Crossing, at best, creates a sense of mild but hardly overpowering curiosity about how everything will shake out.

Basically: A largely unnecessary prequel, though it isn’t entirely without merit.

A Fantastic Ghost Wedding (2014)

Death and the afterlife are pretty grim topics for a comedy, but writer-director Meng Ong just about pulls it off in A Fantastic Ghost Wedding. This darkly amiable film isn’t quite as polished as you might hope, and stumbles badly in an oddly-executed final act. But it wears its big, silly, open heart on its sleeve, and is buoyed by a very good, totally game cast led by two of the region’s most adept comedians – Hong Kong’s Sandra Ng and Singapore’s Mark Lee.

Washed-up former singer Mrs Wu (Ng) is beside herself with grief. Peng (Wang Po Chieh), her beloved son, has been found dead in a local river, taking with him her heart and her hopes for his future. She comforts herself by spoiling him with luxury items in the afterlife, and soon, she finds herself contemplating another old Chinese ritual for the dead: finding him a wife. She enlists the services of Master Wong (Mark Lee) and his adorable apprentice/son Boy (Keane Chan). But the hunt for a perfect match for Peng takes an unexpected turn: one that forces Mrs Wu to really examine her relationship with her son, just as Master Wong must evaluate the pressure he places on his Boy to take over the spooky family business.

Ong’s script does a fairly effective job of balancing the tragedy and comedy of Mrs Wu’s situation: she harangues everyone around her, including her gloomy husband (Jim Chim), into getting the very best in afterlife amenities for her son. But there’s a real sadness here to her loss, one that plays very well into the twist embedded into her search for a daughter-in-law. It’s a point many of us can take to heart: you can love someone without ever really listening to them, or accepting them for who they really are. For every moment of madcap silliness (Master Wong trying to pinpoint a wife for Peng outside a factory full of female workers), A Fantastic Ghost Wedding finds something almost painfully truthful to say about losing sight of the people you love while they’re still alive.

It’s a shame, then, that the film loses track of itself in its final third. Even as Mrs Wu is eaten up by guilt and the sad secret she’s keeping close to her chest, Master Wong’s own determination to prove to Boy that ghosts really do exist forces the script to head into an almost delirious stretch in which paper dolls strut across grass fields and characters confess all in teary, blue-lit moments. Perhaps we’re never meant to know just exactly what happens at that point – is Master Wong running a complicated scam? – but it’s a confusing and arguably deflating way to tie up the narrative’s loose ends.

At least Ong’s three leads are well worth the watch. With her sensitive performance, Ng proves that tragedy and comedy are more closely related than you’d expect: in the same scene, she can punch you in the gut with the weight of Mrs Wu’s grief, even as she makes you laugh over her character’s desperate antics. Lee, too, is an adept comedian who manages to find the darker emotional undercurrents in the relationship with his son. The film also marks an astonishingly assured silver-screen debut for Chan, who is adorably affecting whether he’s running around with a sword or trying to puzzle out why his mother refuses to make contact with him from the afterlife.

Strictly speaking, A Fantastic Ghost Wedding isn’t a great movie – it’s filled with some lovely moments and its cast is great (though Wang and Kenji Fitzgerald, as Peng’s friend Ryan, are pretty stilted), but Ong doesn’t quite manage to make it gel into a coherent whole. Nevertheless, its core message of love and acceptance is so tender, sweet and unexpectedly brave for local mainstream cinema that it’s easy to forgive the film its many flaws.

Basically: Better and stronger in concept than execution, but the film’s cast and message are well worth the watch.

 

Jack And The Cuckoo-Clock Heart (2013)

What do you get when you animate a French arthouse film and flood it with an oddball mix of music that flits from rock opera to folk-pop and back again? Something a lot like Jack And The Cuckoo-Clock Heart. At its best, the film is a sumptuously animated treat teeming with ideas and metaphors. But it also bears a few telltale, creaky signs of being a passion project for co-director Mathias Malzieu – lead singer of the French rock band Dionysos, who came up with both the concept and the soundtrack.

Jack (voiced by Malzieu) is born on the coldest day in recorded history – a day so cold that his heart literally freezes and stops beating. His mother takes him to Madame Madeleine (Marie Vincent/Emily Loizeau), the village ‘witch’ who replaces Jack’s ticker with an actual cuckoo clock. The operation gives Jack life, but will cost him love. As Madeleine warns him in dire tones, falling in love will overheat his mechanical heart and thus must be avoided at all costs. Of course, Jack promptly meets the shortsighted and utterly enchanting Miss Acacia (Olivia Ruiz), a girl he decides to follow across Europe when he’s accidentally exiled from his hometown.

Frankly speaking, the script of Jack And The Cuckoo-Clock Heart is a bit of a mess. A tangle of steampunk and Gothic romance, it never really settles down into a coherent tale. Instead, its characters literally waltz through the film, singing deeply poetic rock songs in varyingly awkward blends of English and French, but only rarely forging believable connections with one another or the audience. That’s probably because the film was assembled around a Dionysos concept album of cabaret songs that was later adapted into a novella. As a result, both story and characters somehow pull off the strange trick of being both simple and forced.

And yet, for all the stutterings of its narrative engine, Jack And The Cuckoo-Clock Heart is an oddly charming experience. This is due in no small part to its incredibly inventive character design and fantastic visuals. Madeleine sprouts tendrils when she must venture out of her comfort zone and into town, while the wooden cuckoo nestled in Jack’s heart literally springs to chirping life every hour. Miss Acacia’s travelling-circus home teems with wonderfully weird characters – a tiny world upon itself, populated by freaks who swirl around her as she dances to a flamenco beat.

Indeed, if you give yourself over to Jack And The Cuckoo-Clock Heart, the strange poetry out of which it’s been meticulously constructed will start to work its magic. There’s considerably more joy to be had in just enjoying the film for what it is, rather than puzzling over its slight and confused story. On this count, you’ll be rewarded with the kind of imaginative mayhem that can only unfold in an animated film. Buoyed by the power of love, Miss Acacia literally floats on clouds and dances in the sky. The film doesn’t so much reference the work of iconic surrealist filmmaker Georges Méliès as co-opt it – he’s a full-fledged character in the film (voiced by Jean Rochefort), an inventor who tinkers with Jack’s heart and finds inspiration for his fantastical films in the peculiar universe of Miss Acacia’s circus.

Most of us have grown up on a steady diet of Disney and Pixar films which, while oftentimes brilliant, are characterised by linear storytelling which young children can grasp with ease. Jack And The Cuckoo-Clock Heart refuses to be bound by such strictures, instead dallying in the realm of bittersweet poetry. Its ending perversely manages to be happy and sad all at once, which fits very well with the off-kilter oddness that characterises the entire film. That can make for a deeply frustrating experience, but also a curiously rewarding one.

Basically: Bizarre and poetic, with a creaky story salvaged by inventive ideas and stunning designs.

Beauty And The Beast (La Belle Et La Bête) (2014)

There have been many versions of the classic fairytale of Beauty And The Beast – from operas and television shows to science-fiction re-tellings. The best-known incarnation of the story, of course, bears the Disney brand and features singing teapots and dancing candlesticks. It sounds ridiculous, sure, but anyone who’s watched that film will know that it packs a genuine emotional punch. That’s not something that can be said of this latest effort by writer-director Christophe Gans, an opulent, lavishly CGI-ed affair that hews closer to the original, darker story (at least at the beginning) but seems to have forgotten the heart of its tale along the way.

The film opens on an elderly merchant (André Dussollier), who has raised a brood of narcissistic, spoilt children – apart from thoughtful, sensitive Belle (Léa Seydoux). As his fortune crumbles around him, the merchant stumbles into an enchanted castle, wherein he helps himself to plenty of food and treasures. The price exacted by the Beast (Vincent Cassel), mysterious owner of the castle, is a steep one: the merchant’s freedom. When Belle arrives in place of her father, she finds herself both prisoner and guest – she’s given beautiful gowns to wear and the run of the entire castle, but must spend every evening having dinner with the prickly and recalcitrant Beast. When the Beast finally allows Belle to see her family again, she inadvertently opens the way to the castle for people bearing prejudice, greed and, quite possibly, disaster.

There’s no denying that Gans’ film looks good – Belle is draped in rich, velvety fabrics, ivory-hued statues lie wreathed in ivy and tears, and the castle stands starkly Gothic against lowering skies. Cassel’s Beast make-up – which makes him look like a cross between a cat and a wolf – is decent enough, though it doesn’t give him much room to emote. There are moments when the film and its ideas seem to flare to life too. When Belle dreams of the people who lived and loved in the castle before her, she becomes witness to a climactic scene in which a horrible curse is cast – a girl lies, dying and naked, on the ground, cradled in the arms of her broken prince, bleeding a gleaming, scarlet trail of blood. It’s a stirring image that might give viewers hope that the rest of the film can be as good and as daring.

But Beauty And The Beast seldom reaches those same heights. In busying himself populating the entire universe of his film with greedy vagabonds and comic-relief sisters, Gans forgets to enrich and develop the central relationship between Belle and her Beast. They share a few stilted, frankly terrifying dinners in which the Beast loses his temper or creepily breathes down Belle’s neck. Slinking into her room to watch as she sleeps, the Beast comes across more as her pervert jailer than a legitimate romantic interest. In fact, none of their encounters suggests that Belle could ever find a place for him in her heart, so it’s odd when Gans takes it as a given and barrels on towards his literally gigantic, CGI-overloaded ending.

Indeed, Gans spends so much time on the visual effects of his film – from the droopy-eyed puppy-like creatures that trail after Belle wherever she goes, through to the huge stone statues that come to life to defend the Beast – that he seems to have forgotten to get his actors to act. Cassel and Seydoux, who have both delivered arresting performances in other films, don’t seem hugely invested in the proceedings or in each other. The film as a whole isn’t helped, either, by the dreadful dubbed version playing in Singapore – moments that might have felt more organic and engaging in the original French feel stilted and almost ridiculous when recited in either monotonous or heavily-accented English.

Sometimes, it’s easier to understand when directors lose sight of their characters in the flash and tumult of an action blockbuster – the focus, after all, is on spectacle rather than heart. It’s less forgiveable when the point of the entire story is the relationship between the two title characters. Without careful, gentle treatment, this centuries-old tale of Beauty and her Beast would have some pretty nasty overtones – which Gans fails to really remove from his film. In effect, his version of Beauty And The Beast is a love story without much love – and, as a result, isn’t much of a story either.

Basically: An opulent mess that’s a feast for the eyes but completely misses the heart.

Temporary Family 臨時同居 (2014)

The themes of limited land space and skyrocketing property prices that underpin Temporary Family will resonate with all Singaporeans. After all, in Hong Kong and in this tiny island-state of ours, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to own a home without having to tie oneself up in a lifetime of debt.  What gets lost in the translation is the film’s awkward blend of comedy and drama, which forces its main characters to veer haphazardly from playing the fool to brooding about as a deeply tragic figure.

Lung (Nick Cheung) is a property agent on a deadline: his incredibly practical girlfriend requires that he double his assets and the square footage of the apartment he’s offering her before she will marry him. Desperate to succeed, Lung convinces his stepdaughter Hak (Angelababy), super-rich intern Very (Oho Ou) and wealthy divorcee Charlotte (Sammi Cheng) to buy a relatively cheap penthouse with him – one which they will ‘flip’ for profit when the price of the flat inevitably rises in future. Lung is flummoxed, however, when new regulatory controls are imposed by the government that make it almost impossible for him to resell the property. In the meantime, the foursome wind up as the strangest – and untidiest – of bedfellows.

It’s not that there isn’t plenty of potential in Temporary Family. Writer-director Cheuk Wan-Chi has created characters who are, frankly, fascinating. Charlotte, in particular, hides a world of hurt beneath her cheery, Louboutin-obsessed exterior. Peeling away her layers reveals a tale of misery that could easily have been the centrepiece of its own film. But the way in which her story actually plays out feels faintly ridiculous, even in moments of high drama and tension. Her character walks a very fine line between being strong and foolish, and Cheuk isn’t quite assured enough a director to find both the comedy and tragedy of Charlotte’s plight.

The other characters are in the same boat. We are frequently told that Lung has a depth and spirit to him that’s now been drained away by the demands of real life, but it becomes increasingly hard to care when his desperation to sell the property makes him largely oblivious to the troubles of everyone around him, especially Hak. What dramatic depth the character has is also leeched away by the string of iniquities to which he’s subjected throughout the film, like dog-sitting for a capricious customer or tangling with an unidentifiable stray hair in the penthouse.

At least Cheuk’s cast is worth the watch. Cheng walks away with MVP honours; she’s as convincing when clowning her way through a scene as she is when heartbrokenly squeezing a cupcake to bits in her hand. Angelababy, so typecast as the feisty, pretty girl in much of her filmography to date, breaks free of that stereotype as Hak, a tantalisingly tough tomboy of a delivery girl who remains close to Lung even though there have been several boyfriends since in her mother’s life. Cheung and Ou do well enough with more undercooked parts.

It’s hard to tell what to think by the time the movie draws to a close. Tables have been overturned (literally), romance has been kindled, and the themes of the film seem to have been lost in the process. To be fair, Cheuk does find something incisive to say every once in a while about the ever higher costs of owning your own home. But she also seems to spend more time distracting her audience – and herself – with comic antics that don’t amount to much.

Basically: This film – an odd blend of comedy and drama – is as awkwardly constructed as the temporary family of its title.

Apolitical Romance 对面的女孩杀过来 (2013)

It isn’t often that you get a helping of politics to go with your romantic comedy of choice. The tensions, history and realities that colour the relationship between China and Taiwan – and thus the odd couple at the heart of the film – are the most striking element of Apolitical Romance, lending it a heft not typically associated with rom-coms. To the film’s detriment, this streak of political consciousness peters out towards the end. But there’s still plenty to enjoy in the excellent performances and snappy dialogue peppered throughout the script.

We’re first introduced to a couple of clichés: A-Cheng (Bryan Chang Shuhao) is a bookish, well-mannered Taiwanese civil servant, and Qinlang (Huang Lu) a brash, opinionated Chinese girl with no qualms about yelling down strangers in the street. Their meet-cute is textbook rom-com (and thus a bit disappointing): after she yells a lot at a dumpling shop and makes him pay for all the stuff she takes from random stores, he decides that she can help him fix his woefully uninformed report on China, and she enlists him to help her find her grandmother’s childhood sweetheart, Chen Guang.

But, thankfully, Apolitical Romance deepens as it goes on. The easy prejudices and assumptions we all make due to nationality and cultural differences slowly fade away, as A-Cheng and Qinlang start to see each other as real people and not just stereotypes. They bicker and banter their way across Taiwan, trekking down Chen Guang after Chen Guang: it’s an odyssey that covers a lot of literal and metaphorical ground. They go from the bustling streets of Taipei to the smaller alleys and dusty houses of the countryside, even as he learns about her troubled romantic past and she takes an interest in his broken family. In the process, they effectively help each other heal past emotional wounds – which sounds enormously cheesy, but doesn’t play out as such in the film.

Of course, the big metaphor demanding to be addressed is the troubled relationship between China and Taiwan. And Apolitical Romance does so in a surprisingly powerful way. This is not the politics of diplomats and war, but the politics of real life: the way history and differences between nations intrude on the present, and shape people and their lives – for better or for worse. For our pair of protagonists, it’s the stuff of the recent past, real but untroubling. Qinlang dances past A-Cheng, calling his country a province, and they sing nationalist songs at each other while visiting the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial. But the film sobers up whenever we meet another Chen Guang, who tells yet another tale of a life and a family (or two) rent asunder by political differences.

Whenever the film veers towards less appealing territory (pretty much whenever it becomes a standard rom-com), its two leads make up for a lot. Chang manages to pull off the tricky feat of being utterly charming when, as A-Cheng, he gloats constantly about his good looks. He’ll definitely break a heart or two when he sinks to his knees in a railway station to get Qinlang’s attention. Huang, meanwhile, tempers her character’s brash attitude very well by allowing us glimpses into her inner life and the heartbreak she hides beneath her cheery exterior.

Does the movie, like all rom-coms, end happily? Well… Kind of. But, as befitting a film that is, however obliquely, about cross-strait relations, Apolitical Romance doesn’t give anyone an easy ending: not Qinlang, not A-Cheng, and certainly not its viewers. As a romance that doubles as a gentle commentary on the way big politics can touch even the smallest of lives, it’s a surprisingly empowering statement: we get to decide where the story goes. The film’s final frame is, after all, whatever we want it to be.

Basically: Apolitical Romance works best as a political romance – when it manages to be smart, funny and bittersweet all at once.

May We Chat 微交少女 (2014)

There are films that paint the bumpy road we take through youth as a time of discovery and magic, despite – or perhaps, oddly, because of – all the hormones and existential angst that come with it. Notwithstanding its chirpy, colour-splashed publicity campaign, May We Chat is not one of those films. Instead, filtered through the ultra-hip prism of popular Chinese social networking app WeChat, it explores the grim,  bitter realities faced by kids struggling to survive in a seedy, hopeless modern-day Hong Kong. But, although writer-director Philip Yung’s sophomore effort clearly wants to say a lot about society, it winds up descending into bleak torture porn and is, as a result, curiously devoid of emotional power and meaning.

The film follows three girls who have befriended one another on WeChat, but have never met in person. There’s Yan (Kabby Hui), the spoilt rich girl who wanders aimlessly through life and one casual sexual encounter after another. We also meet Wai (Heidi Lee), a spirited girl trying to take care of her drug-addled mother and younger sister; and Chiu (Rainky Wai), a deaf-mute girl who lives with her grandmother and earns cash on the side as a hooker. When Yan mysteriously vanishes after a suicide attempt, Wai and Chiu finally meet in person to try and track her down.

It’s impossible to deny Yung’s ambition: he weaves an almost epic collision of character and circumstance into his script. We find out more about each member of the trio: Yan’s tale is coloured in via sombre flashbacks to her unhappy past as a child of divorce and remarriage, while Wai and Chiu struggle to make ends meet even as their quest to find their friend plunges them ever deeper into the crime and grime of Hong Kong’s underworld. This allows Yung to conjure up moments both shocking and chilling, largely involving Chiu as she makes the ultimate – and most horrific – sacrifice to get a lead as to Yan’s whereabouts.

Yung even hints at the cyclical nature of lost youth and tragic violence by closely tying his film to Lovely Fifteen, a 1983 movie that examined in bleak detail the easy degeneracy of those who are barely older than children, but eager to believe themselves adults. In fact, Yung brings in two actors from that older film – Irene Wan and Peter Mak – to play older versions of themselves in May We Chat. Wan, as Yan’s mother, and Mak, as a gangster turned kindly pimp, provide a tremulous link to an era gone by, even as each tries to deal with the new ways in which youths interact in this present.

But, smart and hip as it all is, May We Chat is also an oddly unemotional, almost clinical beast of a film. The storylines intersect in confusing and frustrating ways, cutting back and forth across time, with the overall plot never really seeming to make much sense – even though, once you’ve pieced it together, it’s actually frightfully simple. It’s tough, too, to form much of an emotional connection to any of Yung’s lead characters. In effect, we are told how we should feel about each character, but never really feel it for ourselves. This has little to do with his cast: they’re all surprisingly competent for newcomers, particularly Wai, who does a lot with very little – we never see where all the money she gets from prostituting herself goes, since her grandmother never seems to benefit from it.

It doesn’t help that the final act of the film descends into a cold pit of torture porn. Yung ratchets up the violence to alarming degrees, without ever grounding it in something more real or emotional. There’s an odd emptiness to the way in which his camera lingers almost horrifyingly on Chiu’s bruised face, or Yan’s mascara-scarred cheek, in the aftermath of some explosive act of violence. Wai’s final emotional outburst, after weeks of tense searching for Yan, feels less truthful than callous.

That is, perhaps, Yung’s point. The world is bleak, society is grim, and the few friends we make never really understood us at all. Wash, rinse, repeat. It certainly captures the zeitgeist of a world now moderated, shaped and broken apart by social networking, but May We Chat ultimately fails to connect: both as a coherent piece in and of itself, and with audiences. It may be smart, and it may be ambitious – but it’s also hollow, and not entirely convincing as either thriller or social commentary.

Basically: Nowhere near as frivolous as it appears, but it’s also too dark and detached to really connect emotionally with audiences.

Dancing Cat 고양이춤 (2011)

 

Here’s an important question to ask yourself before watching this movie about the stray cats that wander the streets of South Korea: are you a cat person? Do you find cats sweet and endearing? If so, the stories and kittens of Dancing Cat will appeal to you enormously, and possibly break your heart a little. On the other hand, do you find them terrifying and creepy – or are you largely indifferent towards them? In these cases, this occasionally sobering documentary might go some way towards changing your mind.

This charming, if slight film, is narrated by two men: Lee Yong-Han, a poet and photographer who begins to notice the stray cats that prowl around his neighbourhood; and director Yoon Gi-Hyung, who takes inspiration from Lee to start paying attention to the many felines who struggle desperately to survive on the streets. The final product is a mix of Lee’s photography and Yoon’s video footage, with a smattering of hipster-ific animated sequences scattered throughout.

There’s a lot to like and even think about in Dancing Cat. Through Lee and Yoon’s personal encounters with all manner of cats, from friendly to furtive, sweet to suspicious, it’s easy to understand the growing affection and concern they begin to develop for these strays. We meet cats who battle cars, illness and starvation, and watch them bond, make families and try to take care of their kittens. It’s potentially heartbreaking stuff, and provokes a little thought too, about the plights of creatures we barely think about as we rush through our daily lives.

But, even for the most ardent of cat lovers, Dancing Cat might prove trying after a while. Its relatively short running time of 76 minutes is filled with episodic material that’s engaging enough but never really coalesces into a coherent whole. Consequently, excepting the occasional bursts of tragedy in the lives of these felines, the documentary can often feel like a lovingly-assembled home video – of enormous interest to its creators, but of limited use and appeal to anyone looking in from the outside.

Basically: Cute but ultimately inconsequential.

Coming Home 归来 (2014)

In more ways than the literal, Coming Home represents a homecoming of sorts for acclaimed director Zhang Yimou and Gong Li, one of his most constant and effective muses. In recent years, he has dabbled with martial arts epics and she has gone to Hollywood and back. Coming Home – on the surface a small, intimate drama, but really a film with loftier ambitions – feels more like the spiritual cousin of the work that first brought them to the attention of cineastes all over the world.

Gong Li plays Wanyu, the devoted wife of Yanshi (Chen Daoming), an intellectual sent to prison during China’s Cultural Revolution. Their daughter Dandan (Zhang Huiwen) grows up resentful of a man whose effective outlaw status has adversely affected their standing in the schoolroom and in society. When his long imprisonment finally ends, Yanshi returns to his family – only to find that Wanyu no longer recognises him.

There’s a lot to appreciate in Zhang’s bittersweet (emphasis: bitter) film. The tragedy of this love story plays out in beautifully devastating images: Wanyu waiting with a painstakingly hand-made sign at the train station for a man she won’t recognise anyway; Yanshi sitting with a chestful of letters, each filled with cramped, light-starved words pledging love for a family he might never see again. There’s an unmistakable undercurrent of political darkness here, too: the Cultural Revolution has, quite literally, robbed Yanshi of his identity, and returned him to his wife a stranger.

The trouble with Coming Home is that, even with all of its politics and metaphors, the film is really little more than an extremely well-played melodrama. Wanyu’s ailment is the kind that looms large in soap operas and, while it’s handled by Zhang with considerable class and dignity, it still feels faintly heavy-handed and – at times – a bit ridiculous.

Much of this melodramatic tedium is alleviated by Zhang’s superlative cast. Gong, stripped of make-up and bravely showing her age, slips into Wanyu’s broken soul with plenty of grace – which helps keep her predicament more interesting than it really is. Chen plays the stoic Yanshi with great sensitivity, no easy feat when the character is forced to confront his heartbreak at the beloved wife he has lost every single day. Newcomer Zhang Huiwen fares well, too, in the tricky role of the flighty, difficult daughter whose teenage tantrums have sadly woven their way into the faultlines threaded through this family.

With Coming Home, Zhang has crafted something very odd: a soap opera that aspires to say something a little more. It’s why the film can feel so powerful and so frustrating, often at the same time. When placed in the larger context of an oppressive China, the film and its sad, broken romantic centrepiece make a lot more sense. On its own terms, however, the love story at the heart of Coming Home is only barely-disguised melodrama – and thus, more likely to frustrate than engage.

Basically: More effective as a metaphor than as a melodrama.