Wish You Were Here
在乎你
China/Japan, 2018, colour, 2.35:1, 113 mins.
Director: Bi Guozhi 毕国智 [Kenneth Bi].
Rating: 6/10.
Metaphysical drama is stylishly shot but uninvolving, despite a classy lead in actress Yu Feihong.
STORY
Beijing, the present day. Fashion designer Yuan Yuan (Yu Feihong) visits her old friend, fellow designer Liu Jing (Liu Dan), in hospital after the latter has given to birth to a baby boy. She says she’s recently been feeling unmotivated, and lacking any inspiration at work, and recounts the strange story of how she received a text message from her mother after she’d passed away. One day, after giving a lecture on fashion design, Yuan Yuan faints. Some time later, after returning to work, she’s visited by Keiko (Kinoshita Ayane), a student in fashion design from Tokyo, who asks to interview her. Yuan Yuan gives her some time but that evening Keiko suddenly runs off, leaving behind a box full of heart-shaped biscuits. The next day she turns up at Yuan Yuan’s office, where she’s allowed to sit in on meetings and later is introduced to Liu Jing. (Some 20 years earlier, when Yuan Yuan [Lu Yangyang] was studying design in Japan, she fell for a local, Tomiya [Maeda Goki], and the two impulsively registered their marriage. When Tomiya’s father, a traditional sake brewer, fell ill, they moved to Tomiya’s hometown in Hokkaido, northern Japan. After the father died, Tomiya tried to modernise the family business and spent long periods away from home. Yuan Yuan felt trapped in the role of a Japanese-style housewife, living with a mother-in-law, Michiyo [Hoshi Yuriko], who didn’t like her. After giving birth to a child, she left for China to pursue her dream to be a fashion designer, leaving the baby behind for its own good.) After hearing Yuan Yuan’s story, Keiko admits she is her daughter, and Yuan Yuan says she already guessed. The pair spend time together and seem to bond. But one day Keiko says she doesn’t want her father to know she’s visited Yuan Yuan, and Yuan Yuan should never forget she abandoned her daughter and husband for the sake of her career. Keiko abruptly leaves for Japan. Some time later, Yuan Yuan travels to Hokkaido to attend Keiko’s coming-of-age ceremony, even though she hasn’t been invited. When she enters the brewery incognito as a tourist, Tomiya (Osawa Takao) immediately recognises her.
REVIEW
A Beijing fashion designer returns to snowy Hokkaido, the home of her first love, in Wish You Were Here 在乎你, a stylishly shot but emotionally uninvolving drama that gets by on its main performances, especially from classy Mainland actress Yu Feihong 俞飞鸿. After the commercial flop (RMB44 million) of his first mainstream film, futuristic thriller Control 控制 (2013), Hong Kong-born director Bi Guozhi 毕国智 [Kenneth Bi] has returned to the kind of more modest, metaphysical material that has produced his best work (Rice Rhapsody 海南鸡饭, 2004; The Drummer 战•鼓, 2007), even though the result is still flawed at a script level. Mainland box office has been only a tiny RMB5 million but the picture is much better than that figure would suggest.
This is only the sixth feature by Bi in two decades, in a career that’s roamed from Hong Kong (A Small Miracle 小奇迹, 2000; Girl$ 囡囡, 2010) to Singapore (Rice Rhapsody), Taiwan (The Drummer) and now northern Japan without developing any recognisable personal style on the way. Wish has some of the mystical edge of Drummer – largely in Yu’s contemplative lead character – but otherwise has no personal signature. In interviews Bi has expressed his longtime fascination with Japan and that country’s cinema seems to have been the biggest influence on Wish, which looks and feels far more like a Japanese movie than a Chinese one, with the cool, clean widescreen images of German-born d.p. Roman Jakobi (Control) and warm but understated score by German composer Andre Matthias (The Drummer) both underscoring that impression.
The film gains a lot of its stature from the lead performance by veteran film and TV actress Yu, 48, who’s compulsively watchable as a well-known fashion designer forced by events to revisit her emotional past. Immaculately dressed and coiffed (as befits her role), Yu, last seen as the regal Queen of Destiny in costume fantasy Wu Kong 悟空传 (2017), looks fabulous throughout – which is just as well as a lot of the film is just close-ups of her face. Though in some respects admirable, the film’s reflective style too often seems like an affectation: the screenplay by Bi, Jia Jiawei 贾佳薇 and Zhang Lili 张莉莉 is unwilling, or unable, to express much in dialogue – a device which works on a purely metaphysical level but finally leaves the impression of many issues simply not being worked out. Despite a final twist in the narrative, and an over-picturesque attempt at suicide by one of the leads, the film never really confronts the central issue of the fashion designer abandoning her child and Japanese husband for the sake of her career and making no attempt subsequently to repair the damage.
It’s to Yu’s credit that she makes the character – who’s not in a very sympathetic profession to start with – into a likeable one, though it’s done at some cost to the story’s believability. As the abandoned husband, smiley-faced actor Osawa Takao 大泽隆夫, 51, is so nice and self-deprecating as to be scarcely credible; only young newcomer Kinoshita Ayane 木下彩音, 19, as the deceptively sweet daughter, and veteran Hoshi Yuriko 星由里子, as the acerbic mother-in-law, add some rawer emotions to the picture-book universe. (The film is dedicated to Hoshi, who died in May 2018, aged 74.)
The film’s Chinese title means “Caring about You”.
CREDITS
Presented by Youth Film Studio (CN), HCH Media (CN), Beijing Qitai Ocean Culture & Media (CN), Galaxy Workshop (CN), United Smiles (JP), Bravo Pictures (Beijing) (CN), King David Media (Beijing) (CN).
Script: Bi Guozhi [Kenneth Bi], Jia Jiawei, Zhang Lili. Photography: Roman Jakobi. Editing: Guo Bizhi [Kenneth Bi], Guan Jingyuan [Nelson Quan]. Music: Andre Matthias. Production design: Zhang Shihong [Silver Cheung]. Art direction: Huo Peishi, Tsukamoto Shusaku. Styling: Zhang Shihong [Silver Cheung], Liu Tianlan. Sound: Zhang Jinyan, Usui Masaru. Visual effects: John Dietz (Bangbang Pictures).
Cast: Yu Feihong (Yuan Yuan), Osawa Takao (Tomiya), Hoshi Yuriko (Michiyo), Tsurumi Shingo (Kawasaki, post-office manager), Lu Yangyang (young Yuan Yuan), Maeda Goki (young Tomiya), Zhou Tie (Lei Ming, Yuan Yuan’s business manager), Liu Dan (Liu Jing), Kang Yuhan (Vivian), Kinoshita Ayane (Keiko), Ma Yinyin (singer in jazz bar), He Lin (Chen Qi, Yuan Yuan’s assistant), Watanabe Hiroyuki (brewery tour guide), Yang Kexin (tailor), Sui Shanshan (design instructor/MC), Ishi Nara (young Keiko).
Premiere: China Film Week in Tokyo (Opening Film), 19 Oct 2018.
Release: China, 12 Apr 2019; Japan, tba.