How Long Will I Love U

超时空同居

China, 2018, colour, 2.35:1, 100 mins.

Director: Su Lun 苏伦.

Rating: 7/10.

Well-cast, inventive spin on the odd-couple rom-com starts losing its way only in the final stretch.

STORY

Shanghai. A sales assistant in a luxury watch shop, Gu Xiaojiao (Tong Liya) is looking for a husband with a house attached; when she finaly thinks she’s found one, he (Fan Ming) cheats her out of almost all her money. Meanwhile, equally hard-up real-estate salesman Lu Ming (Lei Jiayin) is in danger of losing his job after failing to find any clients. After an exhausting day, both return to their flats and find strange objects starting to enter their flats. Next morning they wake up to find that what they thought were “their” flats have fused into one. It turns out that the flat is the same but he’s from 1999 and she’s from 2018. Their shared front door opens both left (to 1999) and right (to 2018) but only he can open the former and she the latter. After they work out what has happened, Lu Ming takes Gu Xiaojiao through the 1999 door to the neighbourhood where she grew up, and she sees herself with her father. But when she tries to enter the grounds of the family mansion, the world starts to break up and Lu Ming has to pull her back. The same thing happens back at the flat if they try to cross the time barrier, so the pair are forced to cohabit. She likes all his “old” stuff and he tries out all her “new” gadgets. Neither has any money: Gu Xiaojiao tells Lu Ming how her family was once well off but then her father suddenly died in a car accident. One day at work Gu Xiaojiao bumps into an old college friend, the snobby Xiaoya (Li Nian), and pretends to be the manager of the shop and to have recently married a rich man in order to save face. When Xiaoya invites to her dinner, Gu Xiaojiao asks Lu Ming to pose as her wealthy husband. Both try – unsuccessfully – to get rich by buying a 1999 lottery ticket they know is the winning number. But then Lu Ming discovers that by 2018 he’s become a property tycoon and changed his name to Lu Shiyi. Gu Xiaojiao suddenly becomes more interested in him, but Lu Shiyi has time-travel problems of his own.

REVIEW

Two people from different eras (1999 and 2018) find themselves cohabiting in How Long Will I Love U 超时空同居, the most inventive spin yet on the odd-couple rom-com. The second feature by Inner Mongolia-born writer-director Su Lun 苏伦, it’s basically a heterosexual spin on her debut, the chickflick rom-com Lips and Soul 唇唇欲动 (2013), in which a tomboy and a girly girl were forced to share a flat together. Unlike the earlier film, however, this one is far better developed at a script level – at least for most of the way – and uses the time-warp background to make light points about the changes in Mainland life during the past two decades, both for the better and the worse. Produced and from an original story by comic actor Xu Zheng 徐峥, it’s been a surprise hit, making up for the disappointment of his own starring vehicle A or B 幕后玩家 (2018), released just prior. How Long has taken over RMB450 million in its first week or so, and is still going strong. [Final tally was a very hunky RMB903 million.]

Time travel has become a popular theme in recent Mainland cinema, though generally used as a device for someone to get a second chance at life rather than correct the future: in Miss Granny 重返20岁 (2015) a 70-year-old suddenly loses 50 years; in Goodbye Mr. Loser 夏洛特烦恼 (2015) a slob revisits his teens; in Suddenly Seventeen 28岁未成年 (2016) a young woman’s brain regresses by 11 years; and in Once Again 二次初恋 (2017) a husband becomes 20 years younger. How Long cleverly keeps both timelines going at the same time by having two tenants of the same flat 19 years apart ending up cohabiting when a time warp fuses the two eras together.

Sensibly, Su’s screenplay wastes no time explaining how this came about, getting her two main characters to accept the fact (pretty much done with a shrug), or having them try to reverse the process (which is shown to be impossible). After some initial fun with the time difference – he plays with her “new” gadgets, she loves all his “old” stuff like audio cassettes – they settle down to make the best of the situation, thereby sowing the seeds of a rom-com rather than some kind of sci-fi movie.

Su’s script is way better than her episodic one for Lips and Soul, which boiled down into a succession of cute moments dominated by the girly girl. This time, as well as coming up with more of a plot, she spreads the dramatic jam more evenly, beefing up the role played by actor Lei Jiayin 雷佳音 with a subplot involving his successful double 19 years on. Largely a theatre/TV actor, Lei, 34, makes few films but generally leaves a mark when he does (the confused lead in Memento 记忆碎片, 2016; evil eunuch in Brotherhood of Blades: The Infernal Battlefield 绣春刀II  修罗战场, 2017), and his playing here of both a loser and a winner 19 years apart testifies to his range. As his ambitious flatmate who doesn’t hide her interest in money first, Uyghur TV actress Tong Liya 佟丽娅, 33, who’s had her fair share of so-so roles on the big screen inbetween occasional standouts (the prosecutor’s wife in Silent Witness 全民目击, 2013; landlady in Detective Chinatown 唐人街探案, 2015), finally has a character she can get her teeth into. As well as being good at the physical stuff, she also handles her sudden mood changes with skill and good comic timing. Chemistry between the two is just right.

On the technical side, the film is less jazzed-up than Lips and Soul with visual stings, which is no bad thing as there’s more content to concentrate on. Widescreen photography by Taiwan’s Wang Junming 王均铭 (college rom-com Campus Confidential 爱情无全顺, 2013) doesn’t draw attention to itself with any radically different lighting for the two eras, again letting the actors have their space. Presumably as an insurance policy, given the extent to which the two leads have to carry the film, cameos pepper the cast: producer Xu pops up as a flashy noodle chef, his actress wife Tao Hong 陶虹 as the manageress of a luxury-watch shop, veteran comedian Fan Ming 范明 as a crooked suitor, and so on.

With all this quality on screen, more’s the pity, therefore, that the script starts losing its way around the 70-minute mark with a subplot to an already silly mad-scientist subplot that seeks to bring the movie to a kind of climax but ends up looking artificial. Thankfully, the ending is more subtle – feel-good in a romantic but not obviously cliched way, and gently moving. The Chinese title literally means “Hyper-Space-Time Cohabitation”, which is still better than the soppy-sounding English one.

CREDITS

Presented by Beijing Joy Leader Culture Communication (CN), Khorgos Youth Enlight Pictures (CN), Beijing Jingwumen Cultural Development (CN), Beijing Enlight Pictures (CN). Produced by Beijing Joy Leader Culture Communication (CN).

Script: Su Lun. Script planning: Liu Chi, Bi Kanming, He Yueni, Hua Weilin. Original story: Xu Zheng. Photography: Wang Junming. Editing: Chen Zhongming. Music: Peng Fei, Zhao Zhao. Music direction: Peng Fei. Art direction: Zheng Chen. Styling: Wei Xiangrong. Sound: An Wei, Ji Jing. Visual effects: Bang Bang.

Cast: Lei Jiayin (Lu Ming; Lu Shiyi), Tong Liya (Gu Xiaojiao), Zhang Yi (Zhao Junyi, Lu Ming’s boss), Yang Le (Xiaoma), Fan Ming (potato wholesaler), Li Nian (Xiaoya), Li Guangjie (Sicheng, Xiaoya’s husband), Yang Di (wine waiter), Yu Hewei (professor), Tao Hong (watch-shop manageress), Xu Zheng (noodle chef), Wang Zhengjia (Gu Qixiang), Fang Ling (press conference MC), Chen Hao (professor’s assistant).

Release: China, 18 May 2018.