Love You Forever
我在时间尽头等你
China/Hong Kong, 2020, colour, 2.35:1, 114 mins.
Director: Yao Tingting 姚婷婷.
Rating: 7/10.
Time-bending romance wears its fantasy elements lightly, with very good chemistry between its leads.
STORY
Shanghai, 2019. Qiu Qian (Li Yitong), 30, is a leading dancer at Shanghai Ballet Company who is giving her final appearance in Swan Lake before leaving for the US and marrying businessman Wu Hang (Zhang Chao), whom she’s known since senior high. When leaving the building, an old backstage hand collapses and is taken to hospital. He is identified as Lin Ge (Li Hongqi) and Qiu Qian is sent to his home, where he lives alone, to find out if he was on any medication. In his flat she comes across a notebook in which is written a memoir-cum-novel that uncannily recalls her own life. (It all started when he was a very young boy in high summer 1991. His mother had died and he was befriended by a girl his own age who danced beautifully in the sunlight. But at the end of summer she moved away with her mother, and Lin Ge didn’t know if he would ever see her again. Years later, when he was 17 and at senior high, he discovered Qiu Qian was at the same school and attending ballet classes. She explained how she and her mother had moved to Guangdong to stay with her mother’s brother. Lin Ge had little home life as his widowed father Lin Liguo [Fan Wei], a barber, had become an alcoholic, so he devoted himself to Qiu Qian, who was in training and on a strict diet to take part in a competition, for which the first prize was an all-expenses-paid trip to study abroad. Lin Ge encouraged her, making a plum-flavoured water she could drink to ease her hunger pains. On his birthday they spent the day together, but as they parted she was knocked down by a car. Lin Ge carried her to hospital and, while waiting outside for news, took out an old watch that he and Qiu Qian had found in a pond the summer they met. Suddenly, the watch started up, Lin Ge blacked out, and when he woke up he had a beard, straggly long hair, and looked older. Walking the streets, he bumped into Qiu Qian, who looked unharmed but didn’t recognise him; his own father also didn’t recognise him, and denied he had a son. Lin Ge managed to convince two schoolpals, Da Huang [Luo Ji] and Ding You [Guo Xinyu], that he was who he said he was; Ding You, a Physics enthusiast, reckoned the watch had altered space-time, ageing Lin Ge but also deleting him from the present continuum. As a result, Qiu Qian had never known him and his father had never had him as a son. Lin Ge smartened himself up and joined his two friends selling jeans at a street stall. He started courting Qiu Qian from scratch and, when she didn’t win the ballet competition, he offered to help fund a trip to Prague – via a fictional foundation – for her to study there.) Earlier, Qiu Qian had told Wu Hang about the notebook, and how it reads like her own life story. Now she tries to find out exactly who Lin Ge is but, according to Ding You (now a physics teacher) and Da Huang (now in business), Lin Ge never existed and Lin Liguo never had a son. Worried that the Lin Ge business is affecting her, Wu Hang brings forward the date they’ll fly to the US. (When Qiu Qian arrived in Prague, Lin Ge was there to meet her, even staying in the flat opposite hers. The two became close and led a happy life in Prague together; but one day she discovered that Lin Ge had financed her study-trip himself and has been doing menial jobs in Prague to pay the expenses. Then Wu Hang unexpectedly turned up in Prague on business and bumped into Qiu Qian; he said he could help her to get into Shanghai Ballet if she felt like returning to China. Qiu Qian and Lin Ge agreed to return home; but one day she had a serious accident on stage and Lin Ge decided to use the watch again to change history. As a result, Qiu Qian didn’t have the accident but Lin Ge was erased from her past again.) When Qiu Qian arrives at the airport to fly to the US with Wu Hang, she makes a sudden decision.
REVIEW
All that was true about the debut feature of writer-director Yao Tingting 姚婷婷, the coming-of-age high-schooler Yesterday Once More 谁的青春不迷茫 (2016), also goes for her second movie Love You Forever 我在时间尽头等你. Despite having a more complex plot, with a fantasy time-bending element, it wears its generic themes lightly, has two likeable leads, delivers emotionally at the end, and shows a clear nostalgia for the recent past when life, even then (the noughties), was simpler. Attractively packaged by her regular d.p. Zhou Wencao 周文操 with locations in Xiamen (again) and Prague, the film (originally set for release last Dec and then in Feb 2020) has taken a very nice RMB500 million in the Mainland, almost three times the box office of Yesterday.
Based on a short story by Mainland writer Zheng Zhi 郑执 – published in a 2016 collection named after that story (see cover, left) – the screenplay by lead writer Liu Chi 刘迟, who was a script planner on the hit time-shift rom-com How Long Will I Love U 超时空同居 (2018), just about manages to make sense as it follows a lifelong obsession by Lin Ge for Qiu Qian, whom he first meets one summer as a very young kid and later re-encounters at senior high in the late noughties. By then she’s morphed into a beautiful 17-year-old who’s into ballet and dreams of studying it professionally in Europe.
The original title of both film and short story means “I Will Wait for You at the Very End of Time” – and, thanks to a magic old watch, Lin Ge bends time not only to give Qiu Qian the breaks he thinks she deserves but also to give him several chances at wooing her under the guise of friendship. The catch is that he ends up “giving” her some of his own time on Earth, leading to a situation where reality and fiction movingly collide in the final reel.
The complex, time-shifting plot is handled in a non-portentous way, with virtually no VFX and the whole fantasy element lightly basted on top of a high-school-and-later romance. As in Yesterday, Yao keeps the focus tightly on the central relationship and is rewarded with very good chemistry between dancer-turned-TV-actress Li Yitong 李一桐, 30 but playing convincingly from 17 upwards, and Taiwan’s Li Hongqi 李鸿其, also 30 and ditto. Li’s only other big-screen role prior to this was the love interest in the routine Chen Yixun 陈奕迅 [Eason Chan] action comedy Keep Calm and Be a Superstar 卧底巨星 (2018, dir. Gu Dezhao 谷德昭 [Vincent Kok]); but here she’s more than up to the demands of a lead role, with a wide range of emotions and a natural grace.
Sequences of her training and dancing are relatively few, however, as the film is actually more about Lin Ge than Qiu Qian, and Yao draws a surprisingly good performance from Li Hongqi that recalls some of the sensitivity he brought to the deaf-and-dumb friend in Baby 宝贝儿 (2018) rather than the young punk in the arty Taiwan mess Thanatos, Drunk 醉•生梦死 (2015) or wacky drummer in Mainland comedy City of Rock 缝纫机乐队 (2017). Neither of the leads is exactly stretched by the generic material, but they perform naturally and likeably under Yao’s simpatico direction.
Other roles are smallish, with veteran comic Fan Wei 范伟 popping up as Lin Ge’s alcoholic father in the early stages but delivering some touching scenes later on as the father who recognises no son of his. The suitably handsome Zhang Chao 张超 (the con artist in Mr. No Problem 不成问题的问题, 2016) is okay as Qiu Qian’s dull but rich fiance, while Luo Ji 罗辑, as one of Lin Ge’s schoolpals, has a touch of Da Peng 大鹏 in both looks and comedy. Though Mainland set and cast, the production was creatively produced 监制 by Hong Kong’s Edko Films.
CREDITS
Presented by Alibaba Pictures (Beijing) (CN), C2M Pictures (Shanghai) (CN), Edko Films (HK), Irresistible Alpha (HK), Edko (Beijing) Films (CN), Beijing Asian Union Culture Media Investment (CN).
Script: Liu Chi, Zheng Zhi, Pu Xian, Yang Tongkun, Yao Tingting. Short story: Zheng Zhi. Photography: Zhou Wencao. Editing: Li Dianshi. Music: Huang Ailun [Alan Wong], Weng Weiying [Janet Yung], Cheng Guankun. Music direction: Yu Fei. Art direction: Zhao Xuehao. Styling: Wang Jiahui. Sound: Wang Yanwei. Visual effects: Li Geng.
Cast: Li Hongqi (Lin Ge), Li Yitong (Qiu Qian), Fan Wei (Lin Liguo, Lin Ge’s father), Zhang Chao (Wu Hang), Luo Ji (Da Huang), Guo Xinyu (Ding You).
Release: China, 25 Aug 2020; Hong Kong, tba.