Forever
我爱你爱你爱你
Singapore, 2010, colour, 1.85:1, 89 mins.
Director: Huang Liling 黄理菱 [Wee Li Lin].
Rating: 6/10.
A lightly subversive rom-com about a female stalker, with a fine lead in Dong Ziyan [Joanna Dong].
STORY
Singapore, the present day. Twenty-seven-year-old Joey Tan (Dong Ziyan), video counsellor at the government-supported Wedding Education Department, has secretly fallen in love with Gin Lee (Mo Ziyi), a high-school music teacher-cum-guitarist from Taiwan. The two played bride and groom in a promo video on the joys of matrimony that Joey recently made for WED. Believing Gin reciprocates her feelings, Joey is stunned to discover he has a fiancee, Cecilia (Huang Liwen). With the wedding index looking to fall in Singapore, and WED’s government funding possibly under threat, Joey is ordered by WED boss Soo Wen (Joyce Liang) to make another promo film and tries to persuade Gin to act in it. Now aware of her obsessive crush on him, and with Cecilia also against the project, Gin initially tries to get out of it; but he eventually agrees, on condition that Joey leaves him and Cecilia to get on with their lives afterwards. However, Joey, who still hasn’t given up on her dream of hooking Gin, hatches a plan with amateur videomaker TK (Kenny Gee).
REVIEW
Replacing the serial shopaholic of her first feature, Gone Shopping 逛街物语 (2007), with a serial female stalker who’s also halfway to a mental asylum, Singapore writer-director Huang Liling 黄理菱 [Wee Li Lin], 36, takes another sly look at the potential for madness lurking beneath the island republic’s outwardly utopian society with Forever 我爱你爱你爱你. Inspired by a real-life case, and potentially a much blacker film than Shopping, in practice Forever is much less barbed, and is largely sustained by a fine performance from local singer-actress Dong Ziyan 董姿彦 [Joanna Dong], in a clever balancing act between cuteness and calculation.
On the surface, Huang’s films have a similar feel to those of Taiwan director Li Yunchan 李芸婵 (The Shoe Fairy 人鱼朵朵, 2006; My DNA Says I Love You 基因决定我爱你, 2007), though without the extremes of Li’s candy-coloured, nursery-school look. Like Shopping, Forever is basically a chick-flick, with the male characters largely cut-outs and its emotional obsessions exclusively female. All that’s fine – and even a mission statement by Huang’s company, Bobbing Buoy Films – but the script of Forever doesn’t make such a convincing case for using the rom-com genre as the basis for a black social satire. Where Shopping had a broad array of characters and themes to carry it through, Forever is centred on a single one, and in its second half, where the movie should develop some dramatic momentum, the script lacks the punch and glimpses of real darkness needed to sustain it to feature length.
With a new technical crew – apart from composers Hu Yali 胡雅力 [Alex Oh] and Huang Fushan 黄福山 [Joe Ng] – the movie has a less luxuriant visual look and less mobile editing than Shopping, with Huang’s simple, objective direction carried along by the music and performances. With the catchy main theme by Lin Yi 林亿 [Benjamin Lim] and Dong’s fine vocals, Forever at times tantalisingly becomes almost a de facto musical, with Hu and Huang’s music slipping in and out of the dialogue like a third character and, at its best, managing to be dreamy, romantic and creepy all in one – just like Dong’s love-struck Joey.
In her first film role, the petite Dong, 29, shows signs of a flexible talent that could take her beyond Singapore into Greater China’s Mandarin industry. As the object of her misguided affections, young Taiwan actor Mo Ziyi 莫子仪, 29 – Artemisia 艾草 (2008), A Place of One’s Own 一席之地 (2009), Snowfall in Taipei 台北飘雪 (2009) – isn’t required to do much more than look bemused and/or pin-uppy. Supporting roles are more colourful, though rightly not as broad as in, say, a Liang Zhiqiang 梁智强 [Jack Neo] comedy, and the (unrealistic) use of 100% Mandarin dialogue actually helps to sustain the semi-fairytale feel.
The film’s Chinese title literally means “I Love You Love You Love You”.
CREDITS
Presented by Singapore Film Commission (SG), Bobbing Buoy Films (SG), Add Oil Films (SG), Iceberg Design (SG). Produced by Bobbing Buoy Films (SG).
Script: Huang Liling [Wee Li Lin], Huang Yingxin [Silvia Wong]. Story idea: Huang Liling [Wee Lin Lin]. Photography: Gerald Stahlmann. Editing: Yan Wenzhong. Music: Hu Yali [Alex Oh], Lin Yi (Benjamin Lim], Huang Fushan [Joe Ng]. Art direction: Lin Yurong. Sound: Alan Chong, Jinda Poyen. Visual effects: Alfred Sim.
Cast: Mo Ziyi (Gin Lee), Dong Ziyan [Joanna Dong] (Joey Tan), Huang Liwen [Sarah Ng] (Cecilia), You Yamin (Joey Tan’s “mother”), Chen Huimei (Gin’s mother), David Loo (Gin’s father), Joyce Liang (Soo Wen), Michael Lee (Cecilia’s father), Kenny Gee (TK), KK Seet (Seet, doctor), Lin Qianping (Petrina), Zhang Jiexing (Mei), Vincent Tee, Laurence Pang (WED councillors), Yap Teng Wui (Lionel), Wayne Thong (Mei’s groom), Wong Wei Ming (pastor), Jae Leung, Dwayne Tan (bridal boutique staff), Hong Guoyao (Sam), Yong Kexin (Ping), Jo Tan (female doctor at clinic), Audrey Luo, Dennis Tan (couple in TK’s videos), Shawn Chong (Joey’s landlady), Zec Ng, Kelvin Toh (policemen), Nathaniel Mah, Sharon Chen, Chia Yang Jin, Sng Min Yee, Barnabas Chua, Li Kiong Gan, Vegas Low, Daniel Ng, Duoni Dan, Kenrick Lam (Gin’s students), Ris Low, Jeszlene Zhou, Melissa Faith, Chloe Masada (female patients at clinic).
Premiere: Jakarta Film Festival (View from the SEA), 1 Dec 2010.
Release: Singapore, 3 Mar 2011.
(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 2 Dec 2010.)