Love Deposit
爱情银行
China, 2013, colour, 16:9, 93 mins.
Director: Qu Jiangtao 曲江涛.
Rating: 6/10.
Pleasant but structurally bumpy rom-com has some charming moments and good leads.
STORY
A suburb of Qingdao, northern China, summer 2012. He Muyang (Xia Yu) runs a small cafe named Love Bank 爱情银行, so called because he also offers a service for couples in love. For RMB660 he will record each partner’s private thoughts-cum-love letter and lock the video cards in a deposit box in the cafe; if the couple are still together after a year, they get the cards and their money back, but if they’ve split up by then, they lose both. One night, He Muyang comes home, drunk, to find a young woman, Yu Xiaoyu (Zhou Hong), asleep in the cafe. Initially she accuses him of attempted rape but, after she calms down and the matter is settled by He Muyang’s policeman friend (Luo Jingmin), they go off for a coffee together. She tells He Muyang that she and her boyfriend of the time, Wang (Xu Zhihe), once used his “love bank”; now they’ve split up, she wants the video cards back, but Wang has both the contract and the deposit-box keys. He Muyang finally agrees to refund her the money but not to return the video cards. After she’s sacked from her job at the city’s acquarium, he offers her one in the cafe, and agrees to tell her (a bit at a time) what Wang said about her on his video card. As they spend together, they become closer.
REVIEW
A rom-com centred on a man who runs a “love bank” where couples can “deposit” video valentines, Love Deposit 爱情银行 is a nice idea that doesn’t quite come off on screen but makes pleasant enough viewing thanks to its performances. Not normally one’s first choice for a romantic comedy lead, Xia Yu 夏雨 is actually pretty good here, despite being equipped with a unsuitable moustache and goatee to give him a beachcomber look. The revelation, however, is 25-year-old model-actress Zhou Hong 周泓, in her first film lead: averagely dressed and lightly made up for most of the time, Zhou, who’s already done some interesting work in TV dramas, shows a gift here for romantic comedy, as well as a natural big-screen presence that doesn’t rely on clothes or glamour.
The first half hour – in which Yu Xiaoyu, disappointed in love, tries to get her video valentine back from “love bank” manager He Muyang – is basically an over-complicated way of getting the two leads to meet cute and then spend time together. En route there are some funny sequences which build their odd-couple chemistry, espcially one set in a coffee bar where He Muyang makes her pay for RMB2,000 worth of drinks, but the real story only starts at the 30-minute mark, as Yu Xiaoyu takes a job as a waitress at He Muyang’s cafe. What’s nice about Love Deposit is its free sense of structure – a diversion about an old couple who deposit valentines or a robbery of a nearby ATM are casually dropped in – which reflects not only He Muyang’s attitude towards life but also the laidback, seaside setting around Qingdao. In the same way, the romance between He Muyang and Yu Xiaoyu develops in an easy, offhand way that’s quite unformulaic.
The problem is that when, an hour in, the film starts getting more serious and introduces the cliche of the “old girlfriend” in an attempt to fill out He Muyang’s character, the effect is quite jolting. Maybe some material disappeared during production or maybe the script needed at least one more revision; whatever the case, Qu Jiangtao 曲江涛 (TVM A Grandson from America 孙子从美国来, 2012) doesn’t show a strong enough directing personality to bring the fragile confection off as a whole, though he and his cast do create some genuinely charming moments along the way.
Xia’s hard northern cafe proprietor-cum-“bank” manager and Zhou’s slightly softer but equally determined character make an offbeat pair whose ups-and-downs are watchable enough even when the plot seems to be going nowhere in particular. The final half-hour – which puts He Muyang’s past under the microscope and basically gets rid of Yu Xiaoyu for a while to do so – pulls itself together for a feel-good ending thanks to a fine scene between Xia and Taiwan singer-TV actress Xu Jie’er 徐洁儿, 34, very solid here as He Muyang’s ex-from-the-past. Among the other supports, Luo Jingmin 罗京民 is good as a cynical old police officer and Wang Xiang 王翔 as He Muyang’s podgy employee. Director Qu himself cameos as a comic gangster at the start.
The summery seaside setting, in a quiet surbub of Qingdao, is relaxedly caught in the photography of d.p. Wang Hu 王琥, and other technical credits are okay without being rom-com super-slick. As it loosely stands, Love Deposit is more a romance with comic elements than a true rom-com. The original title simply means “Love Bank”. In China the film was marketed as a release for so-called White Day 白色情人节, a kind of Valentine’s-One-Month-Later Day popular in Northeast Asia.
CREDITS
Presented by October Days Culture Media (CN). Produced by October Days Culture Media (CN).
Script: Qu Jiangtao, Huang Jing. Original script: Yang Zixuan. Photography: Wang Hu. Editing: Zhang Jiahui [Cheung Ka-fai], Ding Yijue. Music: Sun Lei, Tian Manhan. Theme song: Xu Jie’er. Art direction: Liu Yuenan. Costumes: Huang Haiguang. Sound: Wu Jingjing. Executive direction: Yang Yue.
Cast: Xia Yu (He Muyang), Zhou Hong (Yu Xiaoyu), Xu Jie’er (Bai Qian), Luo Jingmin (old policeman), Wang Xiang (Xiaopang/Fatty, He Muyang’s employee), Chang Yuan (coffee-shop waiter), Jiang Han (insurance salesman), Xu Zhihe (Wang), Yang Shu (Charles, Bai Qian’s husband), Tan Deting (old man), Song Yufang (Ping, his sick wife), Jiao Xuefeng (Huang Jingjing, reunion-dinner host), Hou Minghao (Zhao, young policeman), Gao Jia (police captain), Sun Yixin (insurance salesman’s boss), Wu Xiaoyu (woman in love), Jiang Yongpeng (man in love), Yang Yilin (boy in street), Li Congyun (stallholder’s daughter), Qu Jiangtao (chief gangster).
Release: China, 14 Mar 2013.
(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 21 Apr 2013.)