Forever Love

北京时间

China, 2015, colour, 2.35:1, 95 mins.

Director: An Zhanjun 安战军.

Rating: 5/10.

Love story yoyo-ing across 50 years is solidly packaged but thinly scripted.

STORY

Beijing, 2008. The aged Shi Changgong (Li Baotian), a onetime national model worker, has a cerebral aneurism and suffers memory lapses but refuses to stay in hospital. He visits the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square, and his mind goes back in time. (It is 28 Mar 1959, and the Great Hall is being hurriedly built to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the PRC’s founding on 1 Oct. Shi Changgong [Ma Yuan] is the leader of a team of carpenters.) Cocky Wang Xiaomo (Sun Yizhou) bursts into a police station, where Shi Changgong is under arrest for breaking into the Great Hall, and demands the old man’s release. Wang Xiaomo is an architecture student working as an intern under Chuan (Liu Wei) – an old comrade of Shi Changgong and one of the architects on the Olympic Bird’s Nest stadium – who’s put him in charge of looking after Shi Changgong. (Young technician Xue Yalan [Chen Qiao’en], a Moscow graduate and now a quality inspector on the building of the Great Hall, ticks off Shi Changgong over a problem, but the two later get to like each other.) After Chuan arrives at the police station and explains the situtaion to the officer there (Shao Feng), Shi Changgong is released into Wang Xiaomo’s safe keeping. Wang Xiaomo and his actress girlfriend Zhou Xuetong [Zhou Xiuna] take Shi Changgong back home but the latter locks them out. Shi Changgong still carries around a b&w photo of the young Xue Yalan whom he believes is still alive. (One day, Shi Changgong gives Xue Yalan a ride back on his bike to her home and the two bond.) Shi Changgong visits Xue Yalan’s former home, thinking she is still there; but it’s now a luxury footbath centre. (Shi Changgong struggles to meet a deadline at work but with Xue Yalan’s help he and his team succeed.) The manager (Liu Xiaoye) eventually throws Shi Changgong out and demands compensation for breakages he’s caused. Wang Xiaomo is humiliated in front of his girlfriend when he can’t sort the problem out, so she asks a big-boss friend to intervene. A CT scan reveals that Shi Changgong’s aneurism is getting worse and will soon make him blind. (Xue Yalan collapses at work and her mother [Na Renhua] is told her daughter has leukaemia, just like her late father.) Wang Xiaomo asks Zhou Xuetong to find a Xue Yalan lookalike actress to pretend to be her, before Shi Changgong becomes really ill. (Xue Yalan returns to work at the building site but Shi Changgong is confused when she suddenly acts coldly towards him.)

REVIEW

Yoyo-ing back and forth between 2008 and 1959, via a rather artificial love story, Forever Love 北京时间 is a middling work by superior Mainland journeyman An Zhanjun 安战军, whose best films – inbetween regulation war movies – have been ensemble character stories set in Beijing, such as The Parking Attendant in July 看车人的七月 (2003), Hutong Days 胡同里的阳光 (2008) and Glittering Days 万家灯火 (2009). Nicely put together in a typically unflashy way, with the accent solidly on performances, it’s another film celebrating China’s development over the past 50 years – from the building of Beijing’s Great Hall of the People to mark the PRC’s 10th anniversary to the completion of the Bird’s Nest arena for the Olympics. An has generally managed to wrap message pictures in human clothes, and the same goes here, with good playing by veteran Mainland actor Li Baotian 李保田 and by Taiwan actress Chen Qiao’en 陈乔恩, but overall the script is thin, with too little dramatic juice after a sudden revelation halfway. Box office was a very quiet RMB29 million.

An made the film between A Young Girl’s Destiny 逆袭 (2013), a solid drama set in Beijing’s TV world, and his little-known rural drama The Unexpected 原祸 (2016), but his habit of not working regularly with the same writers means it could have been done at any time during the past 20 years. The team of four writers, led by prolific TV scripter Gao Mantang 高满堂, give the whole thing a rather bloodless feel, with the cast left to give it some personality. As the elderly but ailing protagonist – once a national model worker – Li, then 69, is dignified if not stretched in any way; as the love of his youth, the reliable Chen, 36, a frequent player in Mainland movies (The Allure of Tears 倾城之泪, 2011; The Continent 后会无期, 2014), plays her 1950s cadre with a lightness of touch that unfortunately isn’t mirrored by the performance of Ma Yuan 马元, 32, as her equally Party-minded lover. Veteran actress Na Renhua 娜仁花 (from Glittering Days) brings some gravity in a few scenes as her mother, while Mainland-born, Hong Kong-based glamourpuss Zhou Xiuna 周秀娜 [Chrissie Chau] is more than okay as a TV actress in the modern scenes.

Packaging is smooth, starting with an impressive title sequence in which “old” Beijing meets the new via a VFX letter flying through the air, and with convincing scenes of the Great Hall under construction in the late 1950s. Widescreen photography by d.p. Yuan Jiaping 袁佳平 (who shot An’s crime drama  Brother 黑暗中的救赎, 2012, and went on to shoot his 1980s-set drama For the Memory Never Forgotten 黑蝴蝶, 2017) is clean and bright, and the Chinese orchestral score by veteran Yang Yilun 杨一伦 is conventional but effective. One of the film’s posters tried to disguise the fact that half the movie is set in the 1950s, cutting out Li’s image and trying to sell it as a modern youth drama (see left). The meaningless Chinese title means “Beijing Time”; the bland English title was also used on two 2013 films, the Mainland rom-com 201314 and the Taiwan nostalgia item 阿嬷的梦中情人.

CREDITS

Presented by Beijing TV Art Centre (CN). Produced by Beijing Municipal Committee Publicity Department (CN), Beijing Municipal Bureau of Press, Publication, Radio, Film & TV (CN), Beijing Media Network (CN), Beijing TV Art Centre (CN), Gehua CATV Investment Management (CN), Beijing Galloping Horse Film (CN).

Script: Gao Mantang, Li Zhou, Xu Chao, Zhao Lei. Photography: Yuan Jiaping. Editing: Wang Yongjie. Music: Yang Yilun. Solo voice: Yang Yue. Art direction: Cai Weidong. Costumes: Guo Lei, Huang Xiaochen. Sound: Wang Lewen, Mao Jinlin, Kong Jie. Visual effects: A Donglin (Zhouren [Beijing] Culture Communication). Executive direction: Liu Juan.

Cast: Li Baotian (Shi Changgong), Ma Yuan (young Shi Changgong), Chen Qiao’en (Xue Yalan), Sun Yizhou (Wang Xiaomo), Zhou Xiuna [Chrissie Chau] (Zhou Xuetong), Na Renhua (Zheng, Xue Yalan’s mother), Liu Wei (Chuan, Wang Xiaomo’s boss), Ding Haifeng (Wang Xiaomo’s father), Shao Feng (police-station officer), Sun Tao (doctor), Liu Xiaoye (footbath-centre manager), Fang Xiting (Wang Xiaomo’s mother), Yu Bo (CT doctor), Chen Chuhan (Xue Yalan’s doctor), Xu Songting (young carpenter), Zhang Jingjia (TV producer), Li Qi (Bai, young Shi Changgong’s supervisor).

Release: China, 11 Dec 2015.