So Long for Love
再见，李可乐
China, 2023, colour, 2.35:1, 103 mins.
Director: Wang Xiaolie 王小列.
Rating: 7/10.
Light drama, in which a dog replaces the deceased male member of a family, skilfully avoids yuckiness thanks to a strong cast and straightforward direction.
STORY
Altay, northern Xinjiang province, northwest China, winter 2012. While on a skiing holiday with his teenage daughter Li Yan (Tan Songyun), Li Boyu (Wu Jing), 42, is seriously injured in the head and requires surgery. He ends up in a coma in Altay city hospital, and the expenses are huge. The specialist recommends giving up on Li Boyu as, if he were ever to wake up from the coma, he would be a vegetable. His wife Pan Yanqiu (Yan Ni), who has flown up from Chengdu, agrees and Li Boyu is euthanised. Three months later, back in Chengdu, Sichuan province, Li Yan spots a labrador puppy that has escaped from a pet store; later, it follows her scent home. Initially Pan Yanqiu, a teacher at Li Yan’s high school, won’t allow her daughter to adopt the puppy as she is soon to sit the gaokao (university entrance exam) and must have no distractions; eventually, however, she agrees to it staying in the family’s small kebab restaurant that Li Boyu used to run. Li Yan names it Cola 可乐, after the drink her father liked, and which the dog also seems to have a liking for. Cola helps her to get over the experience of losing her father. Six months later, Pan Yanqiu decides she must sell the restaurant, as it’s not making any money and they’re already in debt. Li Yan manages to sabotage her attempts to find buyers and, when the restaurant is flooded during heavy seasonal rains as usual, Cola alerts Pan Yanqiu to a way to solve the situation. After that, Pan Yanqiu allows Cola to come to their flat, and she herself becomes more energised in trying to run the restaurant – though business is still low compared with when Li Boyu was in charge. By chance Li Yan gets to know another teenager, Zhang Huaijun (Jiang Long), who used to be a regular at the restaurant. With his help, and Cola’s, they discover Li Boyu’s secret recipe, which included cola. Pressure of running the restaurant forces Pan Yanqiu to resign from her teaching job. She also tells Zhang Huaijun to stay away from her daughter until after the gaokao, so her marks can improve at school. After Li Yan sits the gaokao, Cola is kidnapped by a dog thief, though Li Yan and Zhang Huaijun manage to find it. Five years later, Li Yan comes home from studying medicine at university to find that Pan Yanqiu has a man in her life, Zhang Ping (Feng Lei). Zhang Huaijun, who joined the air force instead of going to university, is stationed in Xichang, southern Sichuan, so Pan Yanqiu takes Li Yan there to meet him again. The place has romantic conotations for Pan Yanqiu, as it was there that her beloved Li Boyu proposed to her. A year later Li Yan is planning her wedding to Zhang Huaijun, but then Cola suddenly falls ill.
REVIEW
A teenager’s labrador puppy seems to carry the spirit of her recently deceased father in So Long for Love 再见，李可乐, a light family drama which skilfully avoids yuckiness thanks to a strong cast and straightforward direction. Only the third theatrical feature by Wang Xiaolie 王小列, 63, after a long career as a d.p. and as a director of TV/online movies and drama series, it’s adapted from his own novel Poppy Puppy 爸爸是只“狗” (2020, literally “Dad’s a ‘Dog'”, see cover, left), though Wang himself takes no scriptwriting credit. It’s clearly a subject dear to his heart, as his two previous productions were TVDs centred on dogs – Super Partner 神犬奇兵 (2014), set in the military, and Hero Dog 神犬小七 (2015), set in a pet hospital. Strongly cast with comedienne Yan Ni 闫妮 in a straight role, Wu Jing 吴京 guesting as the late father, and popular TV actress Tan Songyun 谭松韵 as the wilful teen, So Long took a warm RMB242 million on release in late 2023.
Wang’s career as a d.p. goes back to the 1980s, when he shot the black comedy classic Three T Company 顽主 (aka The Trouble-Shooters, 1988), directed by Mi Jiashan 米家山, and the prestige production The Birth of New China 开国大典 (1989), as well as later movies like black comedy Party A, Party B 甲方乙方 (aka The Dream Factory, 1997), directed by Feng Xiaogang 冯小刚, and the epic romantic drama The Knot 云水谣 (2006), by Yin Li 尹力. His first theatrical feature was the intriguing curio Seeing Chalila from Afar 遥望查里拉 (1998), centred on a doctor who journeys to Tibet to divorce her husband, followed some while later by Final Testament 与妻书 (aka To My Wife, 2012), an ambitious semi-fantasy about two love stories a century apart that crashed at the box office.
Both films, and especially the first, were kind of spiritual journeys for their lead characters. So Long for Love has none of the stunning settings of Chalila or the visual flash of Final Testament (on both of which Wang was also d.p.), apart from some striking snow footage (shot by Du Zhihua 杜志华) in the Altay mountains at the start, when restaurant owner Li Boyu (Wu), on a skiing holiday with his spoilt teenage daughter Li Yan (Tan), is terminally injured in an accident, partly of her causing. The rest of the film is essentially about her coming to terms with that, as well as with her mother’s decision to have her husband euthanised on medical advice. Aiding her journey is a labrador puppy who attaches himself to her in the street and appears to carry the spirit of her late father. In essence it’s a story of a self-centred teenager learning to grow up, and ends several years later with her taking a major step into adulthood.
In Wang’s novel, the opening accident happens in Nepal, not at a fancy ski resort in Xinjiang province, and so the underlying theme of reincarnation grows more naturally from that location with all its Buddhist resonances. Instead, scriptwriters Liu Qian 刘倩 (a newcomer) and Wu Ti 吴荑 (The Wandering Earth 流浪地球, 2019; The Curious Tale of Mr. Guo 不老奇事, 2021) play down the spiritual angle, pitching the whole story at a more realistic level in which chance may be the main decider and the family’s imagination doing the rest. Memories of Li Boyu (always shown as a kindly figure in Wu’s smiley performance) dominate the wife’s and daughter’s lives, from trying to remember how he dealt with seasonal flooding to the exact ingredients of his kebab dip that made the restaurant so popular. Without disturbing the film’s forward flow, these memories are seamlessly integrated into the film through brief flashbacks.
Wang’s light directorial touch manages to avoid any trace of gooeyness in what is a light family drama in which the husband/father has essentially been replaced by a labrador dog. The ending is handled in a similarly simple, unmelodramatic way, and is all the more moving for it. However, a lot is down to the actors’ natural performances, especially Yan (studiously avoiding any traces of sending the whole thing up) as the pragmatic mother and Tan (who manages to carry the viewer along in her transformation) as the daughter. A good facial match with Yan, and believably ageing from around 16 to her early 20s, Sichuan-born Tan was, in fact, in her early 30s at the time of shooting.
Technical credits are smooth all round, from the naturalistic widescreen photography by Qiu Zhen 邱震 (Fish under the Ice 冰下的鱼, 2020; horror film To Be Continued 了不起的夜晚, 2023) to the conventional but restrained score by Dong Dongdong 董冬冬. Several of the key crew, including Dong, editor Qian Fang 钱芳 and art director Wang Zichao 王子超, also worked on To Be Continued, presented by the same companies. So Long’s Chinese title literally means “Goodbye, Cola Li”.
CREDITS
Presented by Maxtimes (Hubei) (CN), Asia Pacific National Film (Chongqing) Cultural Media (CN), Beijing Dengfeng International Culture Communication (CN), Beijing Super Lion Culture (CN), Shanghai Film Group (CN), General Dream Studio (Shanghai) (CN).
Script: Liu Qian, Wu Ti. Novel: Wang Xiaolie. Photography: Qiu Zhen (main), Du Zhihua (Xinjiang, Beijing). Editing: Qian Fang, Li Jing. Music: Dong Dongdong. Music supervision: Chen Xi. Art direction: Wang Zichao. Styling: Liu Yimu. Sound: Zhou Lei, Wu Lei. Visual effects: Huang Yunfeng, Cao Ping. Executive direction: Yang Qiming.
Cast: Yan Ni (Pan Yanqiu), Tan Songyun (Li Yan), Wu Jing (Li Boyu), Jiang Long (Zhang Huaijun), Zhao Xiaotang (Meng Li), Feng Lei (Zhang Ping), Li Hucheng (Grandpa Zheng), Gao Lu (Wang, teacher), Zhu Hongjia (headmaster).
Release: China, 1 Dec 2023.