Delicious Romance
爱很美味
China, 2023, colour, 2.35:1, 120 mins.
Directors: Chen Zhengdao 陈正道 [Leste Chen], Xu Zhaoren 许肇任.
Rating: 6/10.
This big-screen sequel to an online drama series about three career women is a glossy, easy sit but very shallow.
STORY
Chengdu city, Sichuan province, southwest China, a few days before the end of 2020. BFFs Liu Jing (Li Chun), Fang Xin (Zhang Hanyun) and Xia Meng (Wang Ju) meet at a trendy restaurant for lunch. The divorced and now pregnant Fang Xin, who’s been settling into her new job at a fashion company, is being driven crazy by her new partner, baker Zhang Ting (Ren Bin), who is ultra-protective of her and the forthcoming baby’s health. Xia Meng, who is head of a production group at a media company, says her partner Lu Bin (Zhang Fan), a personal trainer, is acting strangely when it comes to their sex life, while Liu Jing, whose restaurant is losing money and is temporarily closed due to regulations, says she’s booted out her partner Jiang Shanmu (Zhou Cheng’ao), a single father, after discovering he has a dating app on his mobile phone. Keen to downplay her pregnancy, and fit in with her tough female boss (Ni Hongjie) and the other staff, Fang Xin feels relieved when a colleague is rushed to hospital to give birth. Under pressure at work, high-achiever Xia Meng dragoons Liu Jing and Fang Xin into performing an on-stage dance – like they once did at high school – at her company’s end-of-year party to impress the management. Xia Meng is also ordered by her boss to get the TV rights to the latest work by popular manga author Luo KK (Yin Haoyu), a subject she knows nothing about. Meanwhile, Liu Jing is approached by Quillian Media to become a restaurant vlogger and agrees to accompany another vlogger one evening to see if she likes it. Urged by Xia Meng and Fang Xin, Liu Jing also registers on a dating app and, using Xia Meng’s name, meets up with Xiang Dongliu (Bai En), who also turns out to be a chef. The date doesn’t go well, but they end up talking; afterwards, Liu Jing texts Jiang Shanmu that they should officially break up. While meeting her grandparents one day, Liu Jing is quietly given some money by her elderly grandfather (Gong Jinguo), who realises her restaurant business is not going well. In order to impress the terminally indecisive Luo KK, Xia Meng remotely joins his computer gaming group, with Lu Bin, a gaming fan, reluctantly dragged into playing on her behalf. The restaurant that Liu Jing visits with the experienced vlogger turns out to be Xiang Dongliu’s, which further cements their relationship. After an evening out with her colleagues in order to fit in better at work, Fang Xin has her seafood allergy break out, which upsets the over-protective Zhang Ting. Meanwhile, rehearsals for the trio’s dance performance are still not going well, and during a try-out in front of Xia Meng’s colleagues the three women have a serious argument.
REVIEW
Following the well-liked online drama series Delicious Romance 爱很美味 (2021), most of the team – both in front of and behind the camera – reunite in a movie of the same title that’s actually a direct sequel rather than a parallel work. Cross-Straits Taiwan director Chen Zhengdao 陈正道 [Leste Chen] (Miss Granny 重返20岁, 2015; Battle of Memories 记忆大师, 2017; Upcoming Summer 盛夏未来, 2021) is equally busy nowadays as a producer and making drama series, but he’s somehow found time to reunite with his colleague Xu Zhaoren 许肇任, a Taiwan TV director in his early 50s with whom Chen has worked several times before, to continue the story of three Mainland career women (BFFs since high school) on the big screen rather than in a second series. Film versions of drama series are relatively common in Greater China, though they often have different actors and production teams. Delicious Romance keeps the same cast and maintains the same high-gloss look of the online series – but also, despite good performances, has the same shallow tone. The strategy of jumping to the big screen didn’t pay off at the box office, where the film took a very un-delicious RMB14.5 million this spring – a paltry amount for Lin, 42, whose movies (good or bad) usually gross somewhere between RMB200 million and RMB400 million in the Mainland.
The Tencent Video series (see poster, left), which went out in late 2021, ended with divorcee Fang Xin, the pretty but vacuous one of the three, announcing she was pregnant by her new partner, while Xia Meng, the ambitious media executive, decided to try living together with her new boyfriend and Liu Jing, the singleton perfectionist, was still undecided about her love life and more interested in making her high-end restaurant succeed. The online series was set in 2020 – with everyone noticeably wearing masks – and the movie (also featuring masks) picks up the 30-somethings’ stories soon afterwards, in the final days of the same year.
A catch-up lunch at a super-trendy restaurant is used to update the audience and introduce the characters to anyone who hasn’t seen the online series. This doesn’t take very long as each of the trio is basically a stereotype (the beauty, the careerist, the perfectionist) and, try as returning writers Shen Yang 沈洋 and Yi Shuaijie 易帅婕 may, they hardly add up to a trenchant study of the modern-day career woman in China – a subject that’s already formed the basis of countless films and TVDs.
Any depth to the characters is provided by the actresses’ individual performances rather than by the screenplay, which provides each woman with an individual strand (both professional and personal) and brings all three together in a common strand of them putting on a dance number (just like at high school) for Xia Meng’s end-of-year company dinner. Their jobs are, predictably, still in superficial worlds like TV production, fashion and gourmet cookery, and the dance number is set to the US song All That Jazz. The finale aims for a kind of “girl power” triumphalism but overall the movie, pitched at Gen-90ers, is hardly as grounded as, say, earlier girl-power movies like Go Lala Go! 杜拉拉升职记 (2010), MBA Partners 梦想合伙人 (2016) or even the campy Tiny Times 小时代 quartet (2013-15). Though it never drags its heels across two hours, and is always an easy sit, it’s basically a very shallow movie, in a very Gen-90 way.
The film’s strengths are down to the individual performances of the three main actresses, all in their early 30s. In the least showy role as singleton perfectionist Liu Jing, former dancer Li Chun 李纯 (the love-rival in Once upon a Time 三生三世十里桃花, 2017; dancer in Guilty of Mind 心理罪, 2017) creates a compelling portrait, mostly through her sad eyes, of a life on the edge of emotional and business collapse. As the main driver of the movie, Shanghai-born singer Wang Ju 王菊, in her first major film role, throws herself into the part of ambitious Plain Jane Xia Meng, who has to learn that failure isn’t the end of the world; but like the pregnant-but-pretty fashion marketeer of singer/TV actress Zhang Hanyun 张含韵, she doesn’t actually create much of an ensemble on screen, despite the manufactured idea of her rehearsing a dance number with her two friends. Where the online series had 20 episodes to create a sense of BFF-ness, the movie fails to convince that these three are really that close, and the script is far better at exploring workplace feelings than personal ones. Other roles are just okay, with Zhang Fan 张帆 the best of the women’s male friends/partners, versatile actress Ni Hongjie 倪虹洁 (Sunny Sisters 阳光姐妹淘, 2021; B for Busy 爱情神话, 2021) suitably acidic as Fang Xin’s boss, and veteran Gong Jinguo 巩金国 touching in a brief scene as Liu Jing’s kindly grandfather.
As in the online series, the burnished widescreen photography by veteran Hong Kong d.p. Lin Zhijian 林志坚 [Charlie Lam] is always gorgeous to look at and editing by Mainlander Qi Xiaodong 齐小东, at its cleverest when the trio start arguing during their dance number, is silky smooth. Art direction by Chen regulars Luo Shunfu 罗顺福 and Shen Zhanzhi 沈展志 plus styling by Ye Zhuzhen 叶竹真 are all classy.
CREDITS
Presented by Huayi Brothers Film (CN), China Film (CN), Zhejiang Hengdian Film (CN).
Script: Shen Yang, Yi Shuaijie. Script co-ordination: Luo Xiaorui. Script planning: Gu Xiang. Photography: Lin Zhijian [Charlie Lam]. Editing: Qi Xiaodong. Music supervision: Wang Qianting. Art direction: Luo Shunfu, Shen Zhanzhi. Styling: Ye Zhuzhen. Sound: Zhao Nan, Yang Jiang. Visual effects: Liu Shanshan.
Cast: Li Chun (Liu Jing), Zhang Hanyun (Fang Xin), Wang Ju (Xia Meng/Amanda), Ni Hongjie (Zhang, Fang Xin’s boss), Lv Xingchen (Tan Kexin, photoshoot model), Na Renhua (Liu Jing’s mother), Zhao Shuzhen (Liu Jing’s maternal grandmother), Gong Jinguo (Liu Jing’s maternal grandfather), Ren Bin (Zhang Ting, Fang Xin’s partner), Zhang Fan (Lu Bin, Xia Meng’s partner), Yin Haoyu [Nattawat Finkler] (Luo KK), Bai En (Xiang Dongliu, chef), Zhou Cheng’ao (Jiang Shanmu, Liu Jing’s boyfriend), Yang Boxiao (Wang Jichong, Xia Meng’s ex-boyfriend), Ren Luomin (Liu Jing’s father), Wang Ziyi (young Liu Jing), Ren Fei’er (young Fang Xin), Qiao Yiyi (young Xia Meng), Ye Liu (restaurant waiter), Qiang Dongdong (Wu Tie, Quillian Media staffer), Liu Dongqin (Song Chao).
Release: China, 15 Apr 2023.