Behind the Blue Eyes
不能流泪的悲伤
China, 2023, colour, 2.35:1, 96 mins.
Director: Tang Jiahui 唐家辉.
Rating: 5/10.
Fairly standard student romance, set in Taiwan, is kept interesting by its two leads. But it will be remembered mostly for its bold final twist.
STORY
Taiwan. After not hearing from her onetime boyfriend Lin Hancong (Cai Fanxi) for over a year after he moved to Xiamen, Fujian province, China, radio broadcaster Zhao Xinhui (He Landou) receives a cassette tape in a package by her front door. She listens to the tape on a machine at the house of a neighbour (Wang Yaoqing). On it Lin Hancong records his frank feelings, describing how they’d been together for four years but had then split up, despite still having feelings for each other. Zhao Xinhui wants to immediately fly to Xiamen to meet him. But the neighbour, who says he is a professional chauffeur, offers to take her to the address on the package, which is her old family home in Taibei. (One summer, four years earlier, Zhao Xinhui had come back from senior high school to find her mother had let a friend’s son, Lin Hancong, stay temporarily in a room at their house in Taibei until the friend got over her personal troubles. Lin Hancong was equally as single-minded as Zhao Xinhui and the two of them had immediately got on each other’s nerves. She had forgotten that, many years ago as small children, they’d actually played together, and that they had the same birth day, even though he was two years older. When his parents had split up, and his mother was hospitalised with mental-health problems, his father had taken him away to Tainan, in the south of the island, and the two young kids had been separated.) When Zhao Xinhui and her neighbour arrive at her family home in Taibei, her parents are away and Lin Hancong is not there. (Zhao Xinhui and Lin Hancong had slowly grown fond of each other in their own way, and he had spent Chinese New Year with her family. During the holiday her Shanghainese grandmother [Tang Qi] had had a heart attack and died. Afterwards Zhao Xinhui and Lin Hancong had grown even closer, as he spent time consoling and going out with her. However, when his mother recovered she had taken him back with her to Xinzhu, about an hour south of Taibei, and the pair had been separated again. They had kept in touch by letter, as Zhao Xinhui still wanted them both to go to National Sun Yat-sen University, down south in Gaoxiong.) Zhao Xinhui decides to stay on in Taibei for a while, to try to find Lin Hancong. (At university Zhao Xinhui had been invited by a handsome senior student, Chen Xiaoming [Xu Guanghan], to join the Radio Club that produced programmes for the college. Lin Hancong had come down by train every month to see her, but after a year he missed a trip because of his mother’s mental-health problems. To surprise him, Zhao Xinhui had gone up to Xinzhu, where he was working in a bubble-tea shop to make money to pay his mother’s medical bills. They’d ended up kissing for the first time and had gone on their first official date together. But his mother had taken up more and more of his time, and meanwhile Chen Xiaoming had declared his love for Zhao Xinhui. She had politely turned him down, saying she already had a boyfriend, but there were later complications when Lin Hancong had finally visited her again. When his mother had died, Lin Hancong had taken her ashes to the Mainland, to Xiamen, and decided to stay there for a while.) Putting together some clues and old memories, Zhao Xinhui reckons Lin Hancong is waiting for her in the Alishan hills in the centre of the island. So her neighbour drives her up there.
REVIEW
A fairly standard youth romance, but with a massive twist 15 minutes before the end, Behind the Blue Eyes 不能流泪的悲伤 marks a quirky writing/directing debut by Hong Kong actor Tang Jiahui 唐家辉, 43, best known for playing a leading role in 13 of the 19 Troublesome Night 阴阳路 lowbudget comedy-horrors made between 2000 and 2003. Since then, he’s directed commercials. The Mainland-financed, Taiwan-set film, about two headstrong friends/lovers who keep being separated during their senior-high and university years, stars a clutch of Taiwan actors orbiting around young Mainland actress He Landou 何蓝逗, 23. Highly impressive in her big-screen starring debut My Best Summer 最好的我们 (2019), and singlehandedly half-rescuing the sappy Gen-90 romance Serendipity Love 我的遗憾和你有关 (2022), the petite He proves yet again that her strong screen personality can elevate the most formulaic material. Mainland audiences, however, weren’t especially impressed: the Valentine’s Day release took only a meh RMB55 million.
After an arresting opening sequence, the film settles into an intriguing but basically generic story in which a young woman (played by He) receives a cassette tape from a onetime boyfriend she hasn’t heard from since he went to Xiamen a year ago. Listening to it on a neighbour’s cassette player, she’s about to take the first flight to Xiamen when the neighbour points out the return address on the package is her old family home in Taibei. As he’s a professional chauffeur, he drives her down into the city, their search for the boyfriend punctuated by sizeable flashbacks to how the pair met during senior high school and thereafter. During the odyssey, the neighbour functions as a kind of sounding board and wiser elder, nudging the young woman to do the right thing when her short temper gets the better of her.
The central story is a love that comes first out of enmity and then out of friendship, between two people who are equally strong-willed and single-minded. There’s much talk of them being forever joined by an invisible thread, even when quarrelling or (through no fault of their own) apart. But Tang and his inexperienced co-writers Wu Liang 吴亮 and Wu Lizhu 吴骊珠 struggle to raise the story above the norm, with too many scenes (arguments in the rain etc.) that are purely generic.
There’s no real preparation for the massive twist near the end but there are some vague hints that make sense in retrospect: the timelessness of the setting, the message on a cassette tape, calendars without any year-dates on them. Even so, the twist, which is almost casually introduced, is baffling to decipher while watching the film; even after considered reflection, it only barely makes sense.
As the spikey, impulsive, somewhat bolshie heroine, He is in her element, charmingly sliding from tomboyish to girly. Taiwan’s Cai Fanxi 蔡凡熙, 25, who played the smiling psychopath in high-school horror Mon Mon Mon Monsters 报告老师！怪怪怪怪物！ (2017), is more colourful as the male lead than many of his generation, and certainly has more personality than his compatriot Xu Guanghan 许光汉, 32, much more wooden in the underwritten role of the heroine’s wannabe college boyfriend than he was in hit rom-com My Love 你的婚礼 (2021). Quietly stealing the show in several scenes, however, is Taiwan-born actor-comedian Wang Yaoqing 王耀庆, 48, as the sympathetic neighbour who drives He’s character around. The ever-reliable Wang, 48, who’s more often seen on TV, turns what appears to be a script device (giving He’s character someone to talk to) into a likeable, twinkly-eyed confidant.
Technically, the film is good-looking with no special stylisation, and smoothly mounted by Hong Kong editor Huang Hai 黄海. Its strange English title has nothing to do with the Chinese one, which literally means “Grief-stricken Beyond Tears”.
CREDITS
Presented by Asia Pacific National Film (Shenzhen) (CN), China Film (CN), CFC Pictures (Beijing) (CN), Tianjin Maoyan Weiying Cultural Media (CN), Asia Pacific National Film (Chongqing) Cultural Media (CN), Guangdong Chaole Culture Media (CN), Shenzhen Sanyang Culture Group (CN), Shenzhen Xinyicheng Film (CN). Produced by China Film (CN), Asia Pacific National Film (Chongqing) Cultural Media (CN), Shanghai Banana Workshop Media (CN).
Script: Tang Jiahui, Wu Liang, Wu Lizhu. Photography: Zheng Liubo, Tan Jiahao. Editing: Huang Hai, Du Junlin. Editorial advice: Li Jiarong. Music: Dai Wei, Li Baoyu. Art direction: Zhou Zhixian. Costumes: Chen Junda. Styling: Zhang Chouting. Sound: Chen Yujie, Du Duzhi, Du Zegang.
Cast: Cai Fanxi (Lin Hancong; Xiaolin, Lin Hancong’s son), He Landou (Zhao Xinhui), Xu Guanghan (Chen Xiaoming), Wang Yaoqing (Zhao Xinhui’s neighbour; Lin Hancong, aged 50), Zuo Xiaoqing (Zhao Xinhui, aged 48), Dai Teng (Chen Lifei), Yao Aining (Xie Shuqing, Zhao Xinhui’s university friend), Guo Wenyi (Zhang Qiaoxin), You Anshun (Lin Hancong’s father), Ke Shuqin (Zhang Meifen, Lin Hancong’s mother), Qiu Yanxiang (Zhao Xinhui’s father), Yang Jiemei (Zhao Xinhui’s mother), Tang Qi (Zhao Xinhui’s grandmother), Zhang Jinglan (Jiang Ying), Lin Zhenyi (railway-ticket seller), Lei Jiexi (Zhang Shufen), Zhang Guangchen (Liu Mingzhi), Chen Zhaofei (Zhao Xinhui, aged 8), Chen Hongshao (Lin Hancong, aged 10), Li Mengxue (Wang Xinru), Lin Moxi (Luo Liyun).
Release: China, 14 Feb 2023.