Lost and Found

以年为单位的恋爱

China, 2021, colour, 2.35:1, 102 mins.

Director: Li Zhi 黎志.

Rating: 6/10.

Generic relationship movie gains much from the chemistry between its two leads.

STORY

Beijing, 31 Dec 2018. Lu Lushan (Mao Xiaotong) always arranges to meet her blind dates on the metro, so she can get off at the next stop if she doesn’t like them. In the middle of an unpromising one on New Year’s Eve, she’s called back to work at the large hotel where she’s in customer relations. A demo of a new pet app, Pets Love 宠之爱, by a start-up company goes dramatically wrong on stage, and the man in the pet suit and Lu Lushan end up chasing a dog along the corridors. Lu Lushan is bitten by the dog and taken by the man, Jiang Yu (Yang Le), who’s actually a partner in the start-up, to a hospital for injections. Even though she lives in the opposite direction, he offers her a ride home on his motorbike; en route they stop to watch a New Year fireworks display on giant screens. Lu Lushan is from Chongqing, so he invites her for a late-night hotpot meal. They are immediately attracted to each other, and spend the night together in her flat. In late January, as CNY approaches, they decide to rent a flat together. But as soon as they move in, she flies south to Chongqing to spend CNY with her mother, Zhao Xiaoling (Liu Jia), and he goes to see his parents. Next day, both unilaterally decide to return to Beijing, as they miss each other. Lu Lushan tells Jiang Lu that her parents divorced when she was young and she ended up moving around a lot with her mother; she developed a fear of dark tunnels from one she had to walk through coming back from school. In May they get a dog, which they name Zhaocai 招财 (“bring in money”), and start to look at two-bedroom flats, even though they can’t afford one at present. By August tensions between Jiang Yu and his business partner Bai are growing: Bai is worried about revenue as they only have a year to make the start-up work. Jiang Yu, still hasn’t told his father, with whom he doesn’t get on, that he’s involved in a start-up. Lu Lushan suggests he looks around for another job, just in case, but Jiang Yu says that would be betraying Bai. In November Lu Lushan wakes to find the flat flooded from a burst radiator; Jiang Yu pays compensation to the neighbour downstairs. Other pressures are also at work on their relationship: Lu Lushan constantly looking after Zhaocai when she’s busy at work, and Jiang Yu, who invested RMB500,000 in the start-up, always arguing with Bai. As the company is now broke, Jiang Yu and Bai decided to bring in a financial advisor, Li Mei, who’s an old high-school friend of Jiang Yu. But then Lu Lushan starts to suspect Jiang Yu and Li Mei are more than just business colleagues. Forcing the issue with him, she discovers he’s financially in debt. And then he says he and his colleagues have to go to Shanghai for an important business meeting over the New Year – just when he and Lu Lushan had planned a dream trip to Hokkaido, in northern Japan, for Lu Lushan to see the snow.

REVIEW

A couple who meet cute on New Year’s Eve find real life somewhat harder to deal with over the next 12 months in Lost and Found 以年为单位的恋爱, a generic but well-played relationship movie that gains much from the chemistry between its two leads. Only the second feature by Chongqing-born writer-director Li Zhi 黎志, 38, who made the fizzy rom-com Love Speaks 意外的恋爱时光 (2013), with Guo Caijie 郭采洁 [Amber Kuo] and Fang Zuming 房祖名 [Jaycee Chan], it does its job in a realistic and not over-fanciful way, despite having many of the genre’s usual tropes (including an airport finale). After the box-office flop of Love Speaks (a lame RMB23.6 million), Li spent several years directing TVDs before making his big-screen comeback with Lost and Found, which opened on New Year’s Eve and has so far taken a very respectable RMB200 million. [Final tally was RMB232 million.]

Li studied at Beijing’s Communication University of China and made his graduation short, Xiujin 秀金, set during the aftermath of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, in 2009. The 38-minute short was shot in Sichuanese, which is also briefly used in some scenes in Chongqing between mother and daughter in Lost and Found (even though both actresses are actually from northern China). Though most of the film is set in Beijing, Li’s central/southwestern roots keep peeking through.

One of the reason’s for the film’s success is that it reunites two actors (see left) from the hit TVD Nothing but Thirty 三十而已 (2020), centred on three women crossing into their fourth decade. Tianjin-born actress Mao Xiaotong 毛晓彤, 33, and Beijing-born actor Yang Le 杨玏, 34, played an “average” married couple in the TVD; in Lost, she’s a highly organised, workaholic hotel staffer from Chongqing who organises blind dates on the metro for efficiency, while he’s a techie from around Beijing who’s partnered in a start-up company developing an app for pets. The first quarter-of-an-hour, as they bump into each other on New Year’s Eve and immediately go to bed, is charmingly sketched, immediately establishing the duo’s chemistry.

That chemistry carries them through the usual ups and downs as real life gradually intrudes on their fairytale romance. The five scriptwriters have a fair track record between them – Fu Dandi 付丹迪 co-wrote the recent Love Will Tear Us Apart 我要我们在一起 (2021), Liu Chi 刘迟 ditto Love You Forever 我在时间尽头等你 (2020), Yu Jie 蔚捷 ditto Love Speaks, Cui Sitan 崔斯坦 [Tristan Jian] wrote the South Korean comedy retread Scandal Maker 外公芳龄38 (2016), and Zong Miaomiao 宗渺渺 directed the online feature Young and Innocent 天真人类 (2017) – and they come up with enough love and conflict, lightly garnished with a bit of dark backstory, for the two actors to get their teeth into. There’s even a cute pet dog – which you just know is going to be involved somehow in the third act.

Rarely for such material, both actors are equally good: Mao is especially fine at conveying small differences in feelings through her face alone, while Yang manages to be likeably open in his emotions. If Mao’s character – which is the central one – doesn’t quite carry the viewer with her arguments in the emotional showdown, that’s more the fault of the writers than the actress. Other roles are solid but have little to do: Sun Qian 孙千 as the female lead’s best friend and hotel workmate, veteran Liu Jia 刘佳 as her tolerant mother in Chongqing, and Zhang Haiyu 张海宇 (Nice to Meet You 遇见你真好, 2018) as the male lead’s excitable business partner.

A few songs on the soundtrack jog things along and the production is never less than attractive, courtesy several old hands from Hong Kong including art director Lu Wenhua 陆文华 and stylist Wen Nianzhong 文念中 [Man Lim-chung], plus Mainland DPs Liu Fan 刘帆 (Never Stop 超越, 2021) and Zhong Shuo 仲硕. The film’s Chinese title roughly means “A Year As a Unit in Love”; during production it was the rather simpler 一年之痒 (literally, “The One-Year Itch”).

Director Li Zhi 黎志 should not be confused with the Li Zhi 李智 who directed the 2020 comedy Because of Love 疯也起浪, whose name is written and pronounced differently in Chinese. Lost and Found was also the English title of the 2008 money-mad black comedy 我叫刘跃进, directed by Ma Liwen 马俪文.

CREDITS

Presented by Horgos Youth Enlight Pictures (CN), Fusion Pictures (CN).

Script: Fu Dandi, Liu Chi, Yu Jie, Cui Sitan [Tristan Jian], Zong Miaomiao. Photography: Liu Fan, Zhong Shuo. Editing: Li Dianshi, Chen Cheng. Music: Zheng Nan. Music supervision: Zheng Nan. Art direction: Lu Wenhua. Styling: Liang Jiang’er. Styling advice: Wen Nianzhong. Sound: Chen Guang. Visual effects: Xu Mingjun.

Cast: Mao Xiaotong (Lu Lushan), Yang Le (Jiang Yu), Sun Qian (Cui Xi), Zhang Haiyu (Bai), Liu Jia (Zhao Xiaoling, Lu Lushan’s mother), Fu Shou’er (Fu, Lu Lushan’s boss).

Release: China, 31 Dec 2021.