Distance

再见  在也不见

Singapore/China, 2015, colour, 16:9, 107 mins.

Directors: Xin Yukun 忻钰坤 (I), Chen Shijie 陈世杰 [Tan Shijie] (II), Sivaroj Kongsakul (III).

Rating: 5/10.

The best comes last in this uneven portmanteau movie showcasing Taiwan’s Chen Bolin.

STORY

The present day. I: The Son 背影. Mainland businessman Chen Wenxiang (Chen Bolin), a Cantonese originally from Foshan, Guangdong province, arrives at a town on the coast of Guangxi province, southern China, to discuss the shipping of some goods. The container port that’s hosting his trip sends a driver, Xiaobo (Feng Li), to meet him. Next day, while being shown round the dockyard, Chen Wenxiang takes a picture of a limping worker (Qin Pei) he spots in the canteen, and next day follows the man home after work. II: The Lake 湖畔. Chen Deming (Chen Bolin) suddenly has to leave his wife (Xiao Huijun) and young child in Taiwan for a quick trip to Singapore, where a death-row prisoner has requested his presence. The prisoner is his close childhood friend Lin Renzheng (Yang Youning), who is to be executed in two days’ time. The two haven’t met for years – since when, as young men (Wei Handing, Zheng Huanlin), they used to play and bathe together by a deserted lake that Chen Deming’s father (Zhu Shenlong) forbade him to visit. III: The Goodbye 再见. While guest-lecturing at a Bangkok university on “China’s Internet Age Youth”, young Shanghai professor Chen Zhibin (Chen Bolin) tries to look up Xie Hong (Jiang Wenli), his college tutor in Beijing 12 years ago who now works at the university that’s hosting him. Thanks to the help of a student, Pim (Chayanit “Pat” Chansangavej), who’s been assigned to him, Chen Zhibin finally meets Xie Hong the next day, but only briefly; she now has a 15-year-old daughter, Jiajia (Promwilai Leesiriroj), who was born in Thailand. Xie Hong says she’ll arrange to see him the next day; meanwhile, Pim, who clearly likes Chen Zhibin, spends the day sightseeing with him.

REVIEW

Financed by Mainland companies but produced and co-written by Singapore-born, London-based filmmaker Chen Zheyi 陈哲艺 [Anthony Chen], 32, still riding high on his festival hit Ilo Ilo 爸妈不在家 (2013), Distance 再见  在也不见 is a very uneven portmanteau movie in which the best is saved for last. Linked physically by Taiwan star Chen Bolin 陈柏霖 playing the lead in each story, and thematically by the idea of saying goodbye and moving on (contained in the Chinese title), the three tales aim to encompass three types of love – son-father, male-male, male-female – but only the last really hits the spot both filmically and emotionally. And as an acting showcase for Chen it’s hardly very challenging.

Mumbly Chen, 32, is at his least convincing in the first story, The Son 背影 (literally, “Silhouette”), as a businessman visiting a container port in Guangxi province to talk about a shipping deal. (Maybe that’s why he keeps telling his driver not to call him a “manager”.) While there he photographs and follows and finally chats to a lame worker who’s his long-lost father – though without revealing his identity. Between times, he moons around, receives messages from his wife, phones his mother in Foshan, and so on; whether the trip was specially arranged, or a coincidence, is never explained, like a lot else. With his black village comedy The Coffin in the Mountain 殡棺 (2014), Mainland writer-director Xin Yukun 忻钰坤 showed he can construct a feature-length script; but The Son is simply a sketch for an undeveloped idea, cloaked in arty visuals, and annoyingly oblique. Only Hong Kong veteran Qin Pei 秦沛 [Paul Chun], as the broken father, gives it some passing depth and China’s Feng Li 冯立, as the driver, some human empathy; Chen, who is even called upon to speak some Cantonese, is simply out of his depth, a hollow shell.

Centred on two Taiwan friends who meet after a space of years when one of them is about to be executed in Singapore, the middle tale, The Lake 湖畔, is the weakest and – at 40 minutes – unfortunately the longest. Written and directed by Singapore’s Chen Shijie 陈世杰 [Tan Shijie], who’s so far made just shorts, it’s pure festival fare: suffused with fashionable homo-eroticism, shot in a spare, arty style, and with no apparent interest in exploring the emotional issues it raises, beyond lots of flashbacks to the two male friends wrestling by and bathing in a secluded pool. The meeting between the two in Changi prison is a dramatic non-event: plenty of gazing into each other’s eyes but nothing for the viewer to become engaged with. Similarly, the flashbacks to their teens, in which their “forbidden” homosexual attraction is wrapped up in movie codes that are often laughably simplistic. As the grown-up friend who’s now married with a child, Chen Bolin largely looks embarrassed, while Taiwan’s Yang Youning 杨祐宁 gets just a couple of empty scenes as his incarcerated, soon-to-be-executed, onetime would-be lover.