Could You Don’t Leave Me

可不可以不要离开我

China, 2023, colour, 2.35:1, 91 mins.

Directors: Wang Ziming 王子鸣, Xiao Fei 萧飞.

Rating: 2/10.

Four tales of 30-something couples are chaotically written and packaged but with some well-known actors.

STORY

Shanghai, the present day. Radio broadcaster Ye Hua (Guo Tao) introduces another of his reflections on life, in which everyone is as if in a play… In Beijing, businessman Fang Xinli (Jiang Haowen) is planning to float his company on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange but is warned that he only has enough cash in the bank to keep going for another month or so. He asks his former boss Harry (Xu Weidong) for an investment, knowing he’s already been turned down twice. At the same time Fang Xinli’s naggy wife Banni (Sheng Yijie) turns up at the office. Harry procrastinates over the investment. Later, he mischievously tries to bring the couple together by getting Fang Xinli, against his will, to act opposite Banni in a small theatre production. In Shanghai, young married couple Wu Ruijun (Zhu Jianran) and Wen Yonglan (Yi Seong-min) are devoted to each other. He works as a street clown and likes being the sole breadwinner; when she says she’s bored and wants to apply for a job as a car-washer, he reluctantly agrees. From his hospital bed, dying company chairman Xu Qibin (Liu Xin) begs his only loyal employee, Xia Chaoyang (Jia Bing), to marry his daughter Xu Na (Chen Zhuo) and take over the running of the company with her. Despite Xu Na’s urging, he turns down the offer. When his wife Lin Fangfei (Chen Qiao’en) returns from a business trip to Xiamen, he suggests they leave the rat race, have a child and live a quiet family life. One day Xu Na comes round to Xia Chaoyang’s home and entreats him to go through a fake marriage just to please her dying father. To get rid of her, Xia Chaoyang agrees, just as Lin Fangfei returns home. Lin Fangfei stomps out. Later, Xu Qibin’s business rival, Huang Dengyun (Li Yikun), shows Lin Fangfei a secretly recorded video of the hospital offer, hoping to get her on his side. Seeing her husband and Xu Na together, she agrees. Still unable to find an investor, Fang Xinli takes Banni on a romantic trip to Shanghai; but they get caught in a hotel fire that started in a nightclub where Wu Ruijun had taken a job and got on the wrong side of some gangsters in the audience. Traumatised by the fire, Fang Xinli and Banni attempt to overcome their PTSD at an experimental laboratory for AI imaging technology, where things go disastrously wrong. Meanwhile, Ye Hua’s ex-wife Zhou Xiaomei (Xu Xiyang), who’s been very emotional since finding him dating one of his fans, Kang Qian (Lu Jingshan), has an accident involving Wen Yonglan at the car wash where she’s working. And Ye Hua, after discovering an old manuscript by his paternal grandfather, discovers that he and Kang Qian have a link going back several generations.

REVIEW

Chaotically written and packaged, Could You Don’t Leave Me is a train wreck that even a cast of several name performers can’t rescue. Interweaving four love stories set in Shanghai and Beijing, the script by Xiao Fei 萧飞, who worked on the production side of action drama Bodies at Rest 沉默的证人 (2019) as well as co-directing the TVD Fatal Tracking 致命追踪 (2011), bounces around with manufactured situations, phoney dialogue and illogical developments. Functionally co-directed by Xiao with Hong Kong’s Wang Ziming 王子鸣, 48, a longtime TV director best known for the okay action comedy Badges of Fury 不二神探 (2013), with Li Lianjie 李连杰 [Jet Li] and Wen Zhang 文章, the Valentine’s day release took a tiny RMB20.3 million.

Despite a few overlaps, the four tales are essentially separate: a divorced radio presenter and his new girlfriend, a broke businessman and his exasperated wife, a street clown and his devoted wife, and a geeky (married) employee who’s asked to marry his dying boss’ daughter. The stories have been intercut presumably because none of them is strong enough to stand alone but the cross-cutting makes little logical or emotional sense. Peripherally linked by the voice of a famous radio presenter (veteran comedian Guo Tao 郭涛, looking embarrassed throughout), the tales are also meant to be set in four cities, though apart from Beijing and Shanghai even this is unclear. With big jumps in the narratives, and little chemistry between the performers, none of the stories are involving in any way, with one spinning off into a ridiculous development involving experimental AI and another flashing back for eight minutes to a love story set several generations earlier.

Drily comic character actor Jia Bing 贾冰 brings some trademark straightfaced humour to his role of a hopeless husband caught up in a lie, while Hong Kong’s Jiang Haowen 姜皓文 [Philip Keung] has an embarrassing career low as a failing, cowardly businessman. Actresses like Taiwan’s Chen Qiao’en 陈乔恩 (as the exasperated wife of Jia’s character) and Hong Kong-born, half-Chinese Lu Jingshan 卢靖姗 [Celina Jade, daughter of US martial artist Roy Horan] (as the radio host’s girlfriend) flutter in and out, with little substantial to contribute.

Technical credits are so-so. The weird English title seems typical of the whole production’s sloppiness. The Chinese title means “Please Don’t Leave Me”.

CREDITS

Presented by Beijing Lanting Haiyun Culture Media (CN), Yingju Tianji Film (Beijing) Group (CN), Yingju Tianji Film & TV Production (Beijing) (CN). Produced by Yingju Tianji Film & TV Production (Beijing) (CN).

Script: Xiao Fei. Photography: He Shaofen. Editing: Chen Zhiwei, Wang Liang. Music supervision: Song Mengjun. Art direction: Mao Jian, Xie Yanqing. Costume design: Chen Yongshi, Li Donglu. Styling: Liang Jiang’er. Sound: Kang Weidong, Du Pengfei, Zhan Yin, Liang Xiaoqiang, Li Yaqi. Visual effects: Chen Lihua.

Cast: Guo Tao (Ye Hua; Ye Wei), Lu Jingshan [Celina Jade] (Kang Qian; Yang Shan), Chen Qiao’en (Lin Fangfei), Jia Bing (Xia Chaoyang), Jiang Haowen [Philip Keung] (Fang Xinli), Sheng Yijie (Banni), Yi Seong-min [Clara Lee] (Wen Yonglan), Zhu Jianran (Wu Ruijun), Wu Yue (Lei, hospital doctor), Quan Rui (Quan Meng), Chen Yuhua (Shi Tian), Xu Weidong (Harry), Liu Jiapeng (theatre head), Lin Xiya (Xiaolv), Yin Guohua (Wu Ruijun’s former regimental head), Chen Zhuo (Xu Na), Liu Xin (Xu Qibin, Xu Na’s father), Liang Yu’er (Zhang Yue), Xu Xiyang (Zhou Xiaomei, Ye Hua’s ex-wife), Li Yikun (Huang Dengyun, Xu Qibin’s business rival), Li Yigang (Li Li, business executive), Mao Ziyi (Xu Yang), Yang Zongzhe (Du Jianguo), Tian Qiwen (Ouyang Peipei), Gang Yi (Wei Youfu, business executive), Liu Yichen (Han Lei, AI laboratory head), Zhao Lei (Feng, business executive), Guo Jing (Kang Yi, Kang Qian’s younger sister).

Release: China, 14 Feb 2023.