post-screening Q&A at the Hong Kong Film Festival
Love After Love (Mainland China, 2020)
- Ann Hui, director
- Starring: Sandra Ma Sichun, Eddie Peng, Faye Yu
Hong Kong's Ann Hui On-wah was honored with a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice International Film Festival last year. That same fest also saw the world premiere of Love Afer Love, her third adaptation of an Eileen Chang literary work. Specifically, this period piece is based on Chang's novella, Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier; whose story take place in 1940s Hong Kong but revolves around a young woman from Shanghai and her father's estranged sister, who moved to Hong Kong years before her.
Ge Weilong (Sandra Ma
Sichun) had come to Hong Kong as a student. Requiring financial assistance, she decides to seek the help of her wealthy aunt, Mrs. Liang (Faye Yu). Although they are blood relatives, the two females appear to have little in common -- at least initially. But after Weilong is taken into Mrs. Liang's fold at the urging of a man they both come to call "Uncle" (Fan Wei) and groomed to fit into their rarified world (which, visually, at least, resembles a living museum, filled with expensive and/or antique ornaments and ornamentation), they end up having a number of commonalities -- including a physical attraction to George (Eddie Peng), a hunky ne'er-do-well who few women seem able to resist.
A confession: even before the often negative -- or, at best, lukewarm -- reviews came trickling in soon after its Venice screening, I already worried about whether I'd like Love After Love. One big reason is that, despite Ann Hui being my favorite female Hong Kong filmmaker (in an actually pretty crowded field) thanks to works like The Secret (1979), The Way We Are (2008) and A Simple Life (2011), I'm not generally a fan of her historical dramas -- and, in fact, really disliked her previous adaptation of an Eileen Chang work before this: Eighteen Springs (1997).
Fast foward to just a few days before I was going to finally view Love After Love and a Mainland Chinese friend told me about this period drama having been the subject of much criticism in Mainland China, where it had opened weeks before doing so in the filmmaker's home city. I imagine that this must have upset the people behind this Mandarin-language movie even more than the negative comments of Western film critics since it's actually officially billed as a (Mainland) Chinese work, was entirely funded with Mainland Chinese money and looks to have been primarily made with the Mainland Chinese audience in mind.
Maybe thanks in part to having felt forewarned about it being a flawed film, I actually didn't dislike Love After Love as much as I worried that I would. Actually, viewing it as I did in Hong Kong, I found it to be more strange than bad; thanks in no small part to the Hong Kong I saw depicted in it seeming to be so foreign to me -- and not just because I don't think there was single piece of Cantonese dialogue in the entire movie either!
To be sure, there have been a number of Mandarin language Hong Kong movies in the past, including the Shaw Brothers productions helmed by Chang Cheh and a number of MP&GI/Cathay's 1950s and 1960s works. But Love After Love also was largely shot outside of Hong Kong: on Xiamen's Gulang Island and Mainland Chinese film lots -- and it shows in such as the faces of a number of the extras in crowd scenes looking far more northern Chinese than would be ones set in Hong Kong ought to be, and the color and energy often associated with Hong Kong being noticeably missing from the movie.
Continuing on the language theme: an ethnic Shanghainese Hong Konger friend complained also of there not being any Shanghainese in this film whose two female characters are Shanghainese. In addition, both she and I agreed that it didn't seem right that Love After Love didn't contain much English dialogue too; especially given that much is made in the movie about its main male character being Eurasian (as in, having had a British mother and ethnic Chinese -- Cantonese? Shanghainese? -- father). Still, in view of how stilted what little English dialogue there was in the film sounded like, perhaps it was just as well!
Perhaps it's the Hong Kong chauvinist in me speaking but not only did I find myself ruing that the Hong Kong in the movie felt more like one re-created by a non-Hong Konger than native Hong Konger but I also thought that the best performances actually came from two Hong Kongers! Playing George's similarly "mixed blood" sister, Kitty, the felinesque Isabella Leong steals every one of the too few scenes that she's in while Paul Chan Pui adds surprising gravitas to his role as George and Kitty's often exasperated father.
Although I wouldn't necessarily say that they did much wrong, Sandra Ma and Eddie Peng nonetheless appear often overshadowed by their cast members and even the costumes (by the late Emi Wada) and set design (by Zhao Hai). At the very least, it can seem like cinematographer Christopher Doyle often trained his camera more on inanimate objects than the animate actors in the frames.
On a more positive note, Faye Yu held her own in her scenes. And even while the character of Weilong was hard to understand and that of George too one dimensional, Mrs Liang felt more well drawn and actually three dimensional. At the very least, I thought it noteworthy that while some of Weilong and George's dialogue got members of the audience laughing in derision on occasion (probably, I suspect, more due to the lines that Wang Anyi wrote rather than Sandra Ma or Eddie Peng's delivery of them), that of Mrs Liang's never did.
My rating for this film: 6.0
2 comments:
Well Written post.
Coffee is on and stay safe
Hi peppylady --
Thank you!
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