Spicy Hot in Love
爱情麻辣烫之情定终身
China, 2016, colour, 2.35:1, 98 mins.
Directors: Xiao Fei 肖飞, Zhengchangzhang 征长张.
Rating: 6/10.
Cross-cut, three-part rom-com has a good cast but doesn’t cohere into a single, satisfying film.
STORY
China, the present day. In Hangzhou, eastern China, live-in couple Liu Jiayi (He Rundong) and Yang Fei (Zhang Xinyi) are about to get married, and are trying for a child whenever Yang Fei is ovulating. Liu Jiayi, a registered guide, has a customer from Beijing for a couple of days – Deng Yuqi (Huang Cancan), who’s initially very prickly as she’s recovering from being cheated by her ex-boyfriend. Meanwhile, in Beijing, northern China, Li Xiaoyang (Qin Hao) has opened a backstreets medicinal chicken-soup shop but business is slow. He’s regularly visited by an old college friend, Chen Xin (Zhang Zilin), who sleeps over whenever she’s had a row with her latest boyfriend. Meanwhile, in Chongqing, central China, photographer Gao Donghua (Zhou Yiwei), who’s married with a wife (Tian Yuan) and young child, has the seven-year itch. In Beijing, business picks up for Li Xiaoyang after a visit by a neighbourhood inspector (Fang Qingzhuo); but he then discovers he may have testicular cancer. In Hangzhou, Liu Jiayi starts to enjoy taking Deng Yuqi around the sights now her mood is better, and at one point cuts off a call from Yang Fei. That evening, Yang Fei picks a fight with him, and he goes out to carouse with Gao Donghua who is in town. Gao Donghua says that “love” lasts only four years and then becomes “affection”. In Beijing, Li Xiaoyang and Chen Xin are visited by her latest ex-boyfriend, Song Ming (Gao Jie), who’s curious about their exact relationship. Next morning, Li Xiaoyang makes a surprise announcement to Chen Xin. In Hangzhou, Liu Jiayi makes a confession to Deng Yuqi, and comes to a decision about his future. And in Chongqing, Gao Donghua realises why his wife doesn’t seem to care about his philandering.
REVIEW
Eighteen years after the groundbreaking Spicy Love Soup 爱情麻辣烫 (1998), some of the key creative personnel reunite for Spicy Hot in Love 爱情麻辣烫之情定终身, an enjoyable enough movie on its own terms but with none of the originality that its forebear showed at the time. Mainland cinema has come a long way in the past two decades, and where Spicy Love helped create a whole New Wave, Spicy Hot simply rides it. Strongly cast, smoothly directed and attractively shot, it’s an easy sit with some nice performances; but it’s also curiously unsatisfying, with no clear centre or structure and a tear-jerker ending that feels tacked-on.
The film is directed by Xiao Fei 肖飞, 33, a producer-singer making his debut as a director, and Zhengchangzhang 征长张 (the back-to-front stage name of Zhang Changzheng 张长征), 38, who’s worked as an assistant director for Xu Anhua 许鞍华 [Ann Hui] and executive director for the likes of Feng Xiaogang 冯小刚, Ding Sheng 丁晟 and Wuershan 乌尔善). The two subsequently collaborated, as producers and stars, on the 20-minute online comedy Arrogance Man 肖张兄弟之爱在安达曼, directed by Shen Muhan 沈慕晗 and released in Aug 2015. Spicy Hot was originally announced in summer 2014, and intended for release on Valentine’s Day 2015; but it finally opened over a year later, in Mar 2016, when it grossed only RMB17 million – around half of Spicy Love‘s hawl of RMB30 million (a lot in those days).
The position of Spicy Love in Mainland cinema history can’t be overstated. It was an early credit for a whole generation of film-makers, from directors like Zhang Yang 张扬, Liu Fendou 刘奋斗, Diao Yi’nan 刁亦男 and Cai Shangjun 蔡尚君, through actors like Shao Bing 邵兵 and Wang Xuebing 王学兵 and actresses Xu Jinglei 徐静蕾 and Gao Yuanyuan 高圆圆, to technicians like editor Yang Hongyu 杨红雨, art director Zhao Hai 赵海, d.p. Zhang Jian 张健 and sound engineer Wu Lala 武啦啦. Liu, Diao and Cai – all writers on the first film – are credited on Spicy Hot as script and artistic supervisors, and Zhang (writer and director of the first film) as producer. Absent from the reunion is Peter Loehr 罗异, a China-based American who co-wrote Spicy Love‘s original story and played a large role in financing and putting together the film. (This time round the money came from the Mainland affiliate of Hong Kong’s Filmko.)
Quite who wrote Spicy Hot is a matter of conjecture, as the official credit, Hua Yun 花芸, is clearly a pseudonym. Where the first film went for a straight portmanteau format, with five separate tales linked by a young couple’s passage to the altar, Spicy Hot intercuts its three stories (set in Beijing, Hangzhou and Chongqing) and then caps the whole thing with a class reunion and marriage. Though there a slight overlap in characters between the stories, as it turns out they knew each other at college a decade ago, the original script may well have been written as three separate stories. The presence in the credits of ace Hong Kong editor/post-production wizard Lin An’er 林安儿 [Angie Lam], plus the recurrent use of fade-outs to paragraph the stories, suggests pre-release surgery.
Despite all that, and the three very different locations in northern, central and eastern China, the film still has no clear sense of place – apart from in Hangzhou, where two of the leads go sightseeing the whole time. Characters are also introduced in a lopsided way, with their backgrounds only revealed much later – a device that works intriguingly in one case (the platonic “best friends” in Beijing) but is needlessly confusing in others. The structure is also unbalanced, with the first hour mostly devoted to Hangzhou and Beijing, and, with those stories largely resolved, the remainder spent on the more comic one in Chongqing.
The various relationships (all dealing with 30-somethings) have a good spread: in Hangzhou, a fiance is getting cold feet about his impending marriage; in Beijing, a platonic friendship between two former college pals may not be so platonic after all; and in Chongqing, a married photographer gets the seven-year (or in his case, four-year) itch. In practice, the second is the most intriguing, as the audience is left hanging for much of the time, and the first and third are the more conventional. In each case, it’s the strong cast that keeps them watchable.
As the pair who comically dub themselves BFFs – 闺蜜, a term usually reserved for female best friends – the always striking Qin Hao 秦昊 (Blind Massage 推拿, 2014; Chongqing Hot Pot 火锅英雄, 2016) and six-foot, ex-Miss World Zhang Zilin 张梓琳 (the girlfriend in He-Man 硬汉2 奉陪到底, 2011) have a gentle erotic chemistry that plays with the viewer’s expectations in a cheeky way. (Of all the stories, this seems to bear the clearest imprint of writer Liu Fendou.) But in other respects, with subplots about a struggling business and possible cancer, the vignette is overloaded with detail. In the other tales, Taiwan American actor-singer He Rundong 何润东 [Peter Ho], 40, as the Hangzhou guide and Zhou Yiwei 周一围, 33, as the Chongqing photographer come closest to the film’s rom-com heart, the first more subtly, the latter more knockabout.
Individually, the actors are entertaining enough; but apart from a couple of brief scenes, there’s nothing else in the screenplay to bind the three male leads together and give the whole film some emotional underpinnings. Among the female supports, Tian Yuan 田原 is the classiest as the serene wife of Zhou’s fumbling philanderer, while Zhang Xinyi 张歆艺 shows a natural freshness as the guide’s fiancee. Widescreen photography by Huang Lian 黄炼 (EX-Files 前任攻略, 2014) is fine. The film’s Chinese title means “Spicy Love Soup: Love for Life”.
CREDITS
Presented by Filmko Film (CN). Produced by Filmko Film (CN).
Script: Hua Yun. Script supervision: Liu Fendou. Photography: Huang Lian. Editing: Lin An’er {Angie Lam], Li Jiahua. Music: Jin Zhiwen, Fu Lei. Art direction: Zhao Xuehao. Styling: Bai Xipo. Sound: Liu Yang, Yin Jie. Artistic supervision: Diao Yi’nan, Cai Shangjun.
Cast: He Rundong [Peter Ho] (Liu Jiayi), Qin Hao (Li Xiaoyang), Zhou Yiwei (Gao Donghua), Zhang Zilin (Chen Xin, Liu Jiayi’s female friend), Tian Yuan (Tian Xiaoya, Gao Donghua’s wife), Huang Cancan (Deng Yuqi), Zhang Xinyi (Yang Fei, Liu Jiayi’s fiancee), Hai Yitian (Zhao, doctor), Gao Jie [Jack Kao] (Song Ming), An Yixuan (divorcing woman), Jin Zhiwen (divorcing man), Li Xuanzhen (Zhenzhen), Su Mang (herself), Yang Dapeng (specialist doctor), Fang Qingzhuo (Auntie Wang, neighbourhood inspector), Xie Dongshen (himself), Wang Ke (himself), Li Xiaochuan, Wang Xinyu (fellow students), Wei Wei (intern doctor), Ma Qiguang (husband), Zhang Yuxuan (Gao Xing), Wang Yifei (Wu, manageress), Liu Jiao (Qiaoqiao, Gao Donghua’s assistant), Wang Mingming (Zhou, lawyer), Ba Duo (Jiang Ziya), Liu Xin.
Release: China, 8 Mar 2016.