Lost and Love

失孤

China/Hong Kong, 2015, colour, 2.35:1, 108 mins.

Director: Peng Sanyuan 彭三源.

Rating: 5/10.

Uneven mixture of buddy road movie and child-abduction drama is weakly scripted.

STORY

Southern China, the present day. In Fuzhou city, Fujian province, a young mother, Su Qin (Ni Jingyang), grieves publicly for her baby daughter Zhou Tianyi, abducted on 4 Feb 2014. Also in Fujian, Lei Zekuan (Liu Dehua) continues to search for his son Lei Da, abducted 15 years ago; his current journey by motorbike has taken him through four provinces, from Anhui, through Hubei and Jiangxi, to Fujian. Meanwhile, a child trafficker (Wu Junru) delivers Zhou Tianyi to a client, but he rejects the baby as it’s a girl. In the Wuyi Mountains, in northwest Fujian, Lei Zekuan crashes his bike. He gets it repaired for free by sympathetic young mechanic Zeng Shuai (Jing Boran), 23, who says he was abducted at the age of four. Though he has no quarrel with his adoptive parents, Zeng Shuai follows Lei Zekuan on his journey to the coastal city of Quanzhou where Lei Zekuan, alerted by an internet volunteer (Wang Zi), thinks his son may be. However, the 17-year-old boy, Shi Anyi (Zhao Wenhao), turns out to have a scar on the wrong foot. Lei Zekuan is thrown out and his motorbike wrecked. Zeng Shuai calms him down and the two start to bond. Zeng Shuai says he needs to find his birth parents in order to prove he was abducted; only then will he be able to get an ID card and live a normal life. He asks Lei Zekuan to accompany him on a 2,000-kilometre ride to a village in Sichuan province, which has a chain bridge he remembers from his childhood.

REVIEW

Six months after Dearest 亲爱的 (2014) comes the much more modest Lost and Love 失孤, also “inspired by a true story” and focusing on child abduction in China. The directorial debut of TV drama writer Peng Sanyuan 彭三源, it’s a uneven mixture of buddy road movie, child-trafficking drama and scenic tour of southern China, as a middle-aged peasant (Hong Kong superstar Liu Dehua 刘德华 [Andy Lau]) who’s looking for his son joins up with a young man (Mainland singer-actor Jing Boran 井柏然) who’s looking for his birth parents. For a writer with 15 years of TV drama under her belt, it’s surprising that Peng’s screenplay is the weakest element: the film takes 40 minutes to pair the two men up for a road movie, and even then, as one false lead follows another, can’t come up with much interesting dialogue to explore their symbiotic, almost father-son relationship. In addition, the movie’s dramatic focus keeps slipping, cross-cutting every now and then to an unrelated story of a young Fuzhou mother and her abducted daughter, and also including distracting cameos by Hong Kong stars – Wu Junru 吴君如 [Sandra Ng] as a child trafficker, Liang Jiahui 梁家辉 [Tony Leung Ka-fai] as a motorway policeman.

The biggest structural fault is that, after starting with the middle-aged man’s seemingly hopeless quest – his son disappeared 15 years ago – the script pretty much ditches his story in favour of the younger man’s quest to find his birth parents. Filling the gap is the growing friendship between the two, but there’s not much natural chemistry between Liu and Jing to power the movie, and their relationship has a very engineered feel, with tiffs, sulks and boyish playing around.

To its credit, the film does briefly touch on the issue of whether, once found, one’s birth family is actually to be preferred, especially after so long – though the get-out here is that the young man needs it to gain an ID card. What it doesn’t properly examine is the sheer hopelessness of the older man’s quest – 15 years after the abduction, in a colossal country like China – and whether it’s time for him to move on. With almost no background provided about his life back home, it’s hard to get under the skin of the character: Liu provides convincing physical packaging (scruffy clothes, shambling gait) but in intimate, close-up scenes still looks like a Hong Kong star trying to play a Mainland peasant. Jing is more sympathetic here than in road movie Up in the Wind 等风来 (2013) but doesn’t yet have the skills to give his character much emotional depth.

The lyrical, supportive score by veteran Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner (best known for his work with director Krzysztof Kieślowski) is a big help, adding emotion without becoming gooey or overstated. The widescreen photography by Taiwan d.p. Li Pingbin 李屏宾 [Mark Lee] of Fujian and Sichuan provinces swings between docudrama-like realism, filtered flashbacks, and out-and-out sunny travelogue. The weird English title looks like a mistake for either Lost and Loved or Loss and Love; the Chinese one means “Lost Orphan(s)”. The film’s running time includes over eight minutes of (very slow) end titles.

CREDITS

Presented by Huayi Brothers Media (CN), Young & Saint Films (CN), Focus Films (HK). Produced by Young & Saint Films (CN).

Script: Peng Sanyuan. Photography: Li Pingbin [Mark Lee]. Editing: Lin Aner [Angie Lam], Zhou Xinxia. Music: Zbigniew Preisner. Art direction: Lv Dong. Costumes: Li Shanwei. Sound: Dou Zheng, Zhu Yanfeng, Wu Jiang. Visual effects: Jiang Hongxing, Kang Anna (Pixomondo).

Cast: Liu Dehua [Andy Lau] (Lei Zekuan), Jing Boran (Zeng Shuai), Ni Jingyang (Su Qin, Zhou Tianyi’s mother), Liang Jiahui [Tony Leung Ka-fai] (motorway policeman), Wu Junru [Sandra Ng] (child trafficker), Sun Haiying (Mao Kejin, Zheng Shuai’s birth father), Xu Di (Weng Guijuan, Zeng Shuai’s birth mother), Wang Zi (Candygirl, Fujian online volunteer), Hu Yaozhi (traffic policeman), Liu Yase (Ju, Chongqing online volunteer), Zhao Wenhao (Shi Anyi), Huang Danhong (Anyi’s adoptive mother), Zhuang Danping (Anyi’s adoptive father), Yang Dongqi (Yang Fei, Chongqing policeman), Guo Shu (young Zheng Shuai), Tian Donglin (restaurant proprietress), Deng Laibin (village chief), Wei Zi (railway policeman), Liu Xuejun (monk).

Release: China, 20 Mar 2015; Hong Kong, 26 Mar 2015.

(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 25 Mar 2015.)