Ever Since We Loved

万物生长

China, 2015, colour, 2.35:1, 105 mins.

Director: Li Yu 李玉.

Rating: 6/10.

College-to-adulthood comedy-drama is a mixed bag that’s best when trying least.

STORY

Beijing, the late 1990s. Qiu Shui (Han Geng) has been at Renhe Medical College for five years, and earns some extra money by writing copycat swordplay novels between his studies. His best friends are roommates Xin Yi (Zhao Yiwei), a wannabe singer, Huang Qi (Yang Di), whose girlfriend is fellow student Juan’r (Shen Tingting), and virginal villager Hou Pu (Zhang Boyu), who is obsessed by unconventional classmate Wei Yan (Wu Mochou) despite her disdain for him. Qiu Shui’s girlfriend is another fellow student, Bai Lu (Qi Xi), a control freak and taiji enthusiast; but he still cannot forget his long-lost first love, Xiaoman (Li Meng), who is soon to marry an official. One day, Qiu Shui’s elder sister, who is in the US, asks him to meet her latest boyfriend, Dick Jones (Jonathan Kos-Read), who is visiting Beijing. While waiting in the luxury hotel’s lounge, Qiu Shui meets an older woman, Liu Qing (Fan Bingbing), when she moves to avoid the attentions of a pushy foreigner. The two subsequently bump into each other a couple of times, and one day Liu Qing turns up at his college, worried she’s pregnant by her boyfriend (Jiao Gang) whom she’s discovered is married with a child. Qiao Shui gives her some pills from the college dispensary, where he then bumps into Bai Lu, who also thinks she is pregnant. Bai Lu’s pregnancy turns out to be a false alarm. Meanwhile, Liu Qing accompanies Qiu Shui and his friends on a bungee-jumping expedition when Bai Lu is busy sitting an exam. She later invites him to dinner at her flat, where she offers him some translation work for a medical equipment company she’s started with a former student of the same medical school, Mao Dawei (Lv Xing). However, Bai Lu suddenly turns up, and subsequently splits up with him. Soon afterwards, during a drunken session together, Liu Qing and Qiu Shui also argue. She leaves him, and he goes off the rails.

REVIEW

After her clumsy attempt at a genre film with the mystery-cum-psychodrama (Double Xposure 二次曝光, 2012), Mainland writer-director Li Yu 李玉 goes even more mainstream with Ever Since We Loved 万物生长, which essays the currently popular format of a student-to-adulthood ensemble comedy-drama. Adapted from the central novel in a semi-autobiographical Beijing trilogy by trendy author Feng Tang 冯唐 – a writer in his mid-40s who’s regarded by some as an heir to the realist tradition of Wang Shuo 王朔 and the like – it’s a mixture of material familiar from other films (student japes, first love, romantic complications) with a deeper theme of spiritual drift and rootlessness that Li previously explored in Lost in Beijing 苹果 (2007) and Buddha Mountain 观音山 (2010). However, the blend isn’t always a comfortable one and, surprisingly, the movie is most successful when on commercial, familiar ground.

Though it’s Li’s first film centred on a male protagonist, it again stars her favourite actress-muse Fan Bingbing 范冰冰, here in the director’s fourth consecutive movie. As the older woman who turns the life of a medical student upside down, capsizing his relationship with a fellow student, Fan is partly the film’s problem. First introduced (in the film’s phoniest scene) as a svelte femme fatale who turns the hero’s head in a hotel lounge, she then morphs first into a much more grounded figure who joins in outings with his college pals and then into a wannabe businesswoman who finally makes a move on the stricken but confused hero. A variable actress who’s only as good as her material and director, Fan, who’s reinvented herself more times than Deva, doesn’t have the acting smarts to repair the central weakness of the script, in which her character constantly slips out of focus. Now in her mid-30s, Fan is at her best when trying least hard: scenes of her fooling around with the hero and his friends, or just sharing natural dialogue, are way better than more high-flown ones like exchanging drunken profundities with the hero in a lab or making existential love by a lake.

The same goes for the film as a whole. The chemistry between the group of four friends (and their various girls) is both strong and natural, and much more convincing than that between the hero and Fan’s character. Now in his early 30s, China-born actor-singer Han Geng 韩庚 (My Kingdom 大武生, 2011; So Young 致我们终将逝去的青春, 2013), who forged his career in South Korea, shows signs here of finally starting to mature into a potentially interesting actor: as the outwardly calm but internally conflicted Qiu Shui, who can’t forget being abandoned by his first love and is now in a relationship with a quirky control freak, Han does manage to carry the movie, partly through regular voice-overs but also thanks to a winning charm and the script drawing him a consistent character. He’s partnered well by dancer-turned-actress Qi Xi 齐溪, 30, as his spacey college girlfriend. So good as the tenacious “other woman” in the Paris-set Mystery 浮城谜事 (2012), by Lou Ye 娄烨, Qi inhabits her role in a likeable and touching way that Fan never quite seems to and, in one confrontational sequence, acts her off the screen.

Technical contributions are strong on the visual side, with textured photography by the talented Zeng Jian 曾剑 (Mystery; Blind Massage 推拿, 2014) that encompasses a wide range of moods and, in a bungee-jumping outing, recalls the train-ride in Buddha Mountain in its play with light. Music is more problematic, with cliched use of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony and a score by Japan’s Kobayashi Takeshi 小林武史 (All About Lily Chou-chou リリイシュシュのすべて, 2001; The Continent 后会无期, 2014) that doesn’t add anything useful. Also surplus to requirements are animated sections to underscore the movie’s more pretentious musings.

The original title of both the 2005 novel and the film means “All Things Grow”. The film is also known under the less grammatical English title Ever Since We Love, which is used on posters but not on the actual print.

CREDITS

Presented by Laurel Films (CN), Guomai Culture & Media (CN), Union Pictures (CN). Produced by Laurel Films (CN).

Script: Li Yu, Wei Junzi, Xu Shaofei. Novel: Feng Tang. Photography: Zeng Jian. Editing: Zeng Jian, Yuan Ze, Wang Yuye. Music: Kobayashi Takeshi. Title song music: Song Dongye. Lyrics: Feng Tang. Vocal: Song Dongye. Production design: Liu Weixin. Art direction: Li Jun. Costume design: Huang Yunan. Sound: Fu Kang. Action: Gao Xiang. Visual effects: Xu Jian (More Visual Production). Animation: Skin 3 (Beijing Hutoon Animation).

Cast: Fan Bingbing (Liu Qing), Han Geng (Qiu Shui), Qi Xi (Bai Lu), Yang Di (Huang Qi), Zhang Boyu (Hou Pu), Zhao Yiwei (Xin Yi), Shen Tingting (Juan’r), Wu Mochou (Wei Yan), Sha Yi (Bai, the teacher), Lei Kesheng (Hu, the old concierge), Li Meng (Xiaoman, Qiu Shui’s first love), Lv Xing (Mao Dawei, Liu Qing’s business partner), Fang Li (man having sex in car), Lu Jinbo (bookseller), Zhang Xuan (Bai Lu’s boyfriend), Wang Yu (Zhu, department head), Zhao Hongyan (boy), Wang Lihan (Xin Yi’s wife), Jonathan Kos-Read (Dick Jones), Zhang Qi (school head), Jiao Gang (Ma Zhifei, Liu Qing’s boyfriend), Jiang Qinyun (smiling girl).

Release: China, 17 Apr 2015.

(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 11 May 2015.)