Love in Space

全球热恋

Hong Kong/China/US, 2011, colour, 2.35:1, 101 mins.

Directors: Xia Yongkang 夏永康 [Wing Shya], Chen Guohui 陈国辉 [Tony Chan].

Rating: 8/10.

Pop-coloured rom-com of three sisters’ love problems is charming throwaway entertainment.

STORY

Beijing, the present day. Wannabe chef Mary Huang (Xu Fan) has three daughters – eldest Meigui (Liu Ruoying), middle Yulan (Gui Lunmei), and youngest Mudan (Yang Ying), who still lives at home. Huang Mudan’s longtime driver is Hua (Liu Jinshan), who holds a torch for the widowed Mary Huang. Huang Meigui, an astronaut on her first mission, is on a space station orbiting the Earth with experienced astronaut Michael Chen (Guo Fucheng), who just happens to be her former boyfriend. Over-tense, and obsessed with procedure, Huang Meigui can’t stop herself trying to find out from the laid-back Michael Chen why they broke up and whether he still loves her. Meanwhile, in Sydney, overseas art student Huang Yulan is told by her psychiatrist (Du Wenze) that the best cure for her molysmophobia is to fall in love again. By chance she meets Australian Chinese Johnny Chen (Chen Yixun) and after a rocky start they eventually start dating. However, Johnny Chen works for his father’s rubbish-collection company, which presents a seemingly insoluble problem for Huang Yulan and her hygiene obsession. Meanwhile, in Beijing, famous model-actress Huang Mudan, who has just received the Worst Actress Award for her role in martial arts movie Seven Star Fists 七星拳, decides she should gain some real-life experience to help her with her next part, a waitress in the musical Full Moon in Paris 月满夜巴黎. She applies “incognito”, as Xiaohuang, for a job in a backstreets coffee bar, where she gets to know fellow staffer Wen Feng (Jing Boran). But after falling for him, Huang Mudan can’t bring herself to reveal her true identity.

REVIEW

Like its two predecessors  Hot Summer Days 全城热恋  热辣辣 (2010) and The Butcher, the Chef and the Swordsman 刀见笑 (2010), Fox International’s third Chinese-language production is essentially several stories intercut into a single feature. Butcher, directed by Wuershan 乌尔善, was a much more homogeneous production as the stories did have an over-reaching dramatic arc, whereas Days, with no overlapping content, tended to jerk back and forth between its five uneven tales. Love in Space 全球热恋, directed by Days‘ Chen Guohui 陈国辉 [Tony Chan] and Xia Yongkang 夏永康 [Wing Shya], goes the Butcher route, with its four threads (set in Beijing, Sydney and Outer Space) centred on a single family and even slightly overlapping. With more evenness between the stories, and a consistent visual syle, Love emerges as a smoother, more involving, if totally throwaway modern rom-com.

The main surprise is that the Outer Space story, with Hong Kong’s Guo Fucheng 郭富城 [Aaron Kwok] and Taiwan’s Liu Ruoying 刘若英 [René Liu] playing snarky ex-partners alone in a lunar module, manages to sustain interest when nothing much is really happening apart from small emotional shifts. It’s the least conventional and “purest” of the four stories, and set in an antiseptic, enclosed environment; but thanks to the low-key chemistry between Guo (looking his most relaxed in some time) and Liu (having fun as a rule-obsessed rookie) there’s no sense of the movie stalling whenever it cuts back to their story. The Sydney-set tale, with Taiwan’s Gui Lunmei 桂纶镁 as a hygiene-obsessed love victim who meets a rubbish collector played by Hong Kong’s Chen Yixun 陈奕迅 [Eason Chan], is basically a single joke kept alive by the grinding gears of the two very different actors. However, its content is the most cliched, with writers Chen Guohui and He Minwen 何敏文 resorting to melodramatic staples to fill in the middle going.

If there’s an acting revelation in the movie, it’s the performance of Shanghai-born, Hong Kong-based model Yang Ying 杨颖 [Angelababy], 22, as the youngest sister, Mudan. First seen accepting a Worst Actress award, and then “working incognito” in look-at-me specs and loud pop-art clothes, Mudan is the daftest but most entertaining of the rom-com siblings – a role that Yang overplays as much as she underplayed her pigtailed, smalltown worker in Hot Summer Days. Her co-star here and in Days – Mainland singer Jing Boran 井柏然 – pretty much gets lost in her bow wave until the quieter ending.

Chen and Xia’s switch of d.p. to Polish-born Bartek Kaczmarek (What the Sun Has Seen Co słonko widziało, 2006) has resulted in a candy-coloured, semi-fantasyland look that pays off emotionally in the closing stages. Editing by Hong Kong’s Li Dongquan 李栋全 [Wenders Li] and producer Chen Guo 陈果 (Fruit Chan, under his regular pseudonym Eighteen 田十八) is trim: though the film treads some water round the 70-minute mark, it still manages to leave a happy lump in the viewer’s throat at the end.

CREDITS

Presented by Huayi Brothers Media (CN), Fox International Productions (US), Fox International Productions (Greater China) (HK), Sundream Motion Pictures (HK).

Script: Chen Guohui [Tony Chan], He Minwen. Photography: Bartek Kaczmarek. Editing: Li Dongquan [Wenders Li], Eighteen [Chen Guo]. Music: Zhong Sitai [Eddie Chung]. Production design: Sean Kunjambu. Art direction: Li Yang. Costume design: Sean Kunjambu. Action: An Wande.

Cast: Guo Fucheng [Aaron Kwok] (Michael Chen), Chen Yixun [Eason Chan] (Johnny Chen), Liu Ruoying [René Liu] (Huang Meigui/Rose), Gui Lunmei (Huang Yulan/Lily), Yang Ying [Angelababy] (Huang Mudan/Peony), Jing Boran (Wen Feng), Xu Fan (Mary Huang, girls’ mother), Liu Jinshan (Hua, Huang Mudan’s driver), Du Haitao (Fatty), Liu Jiahui [Gordon Liu] (Johnny Chen’s father), Du Wenze [Chapman To] (Huang Yulan’s psychiatrist), Liu Yu (King, Huang Mudan’s manager), Zhu Zixiao (Zhu, Sydney DJ), Han Li (reporter), Zhao Lei (cafe manager), Cheng Qingsong (awards ceremony MC), Huang Zhiqi (Bunny, dim-sum trolly girl), Zhang Junning (Pierre), Shao Long (monk in Seven Star Fists), Sun Dongyang (director of Full Moon in Paris), Han Yuye (young Huang Meigui), Lv Sijin (young Huang Yulan), Yao Honghemei (young Huang Mudan).

Release: Hong Kong, 8 Sep 2011; China, 8 Sep 2011; US, 9 Sep 2011.

(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 23 Sep 2011.)