Only Cloud Knows

只有芸知道

China/Hong Kong, 2019, colour, 2.35:1, 132 mins.

Director: Feng Xiaogang 冯小刚.

Rating: 7/10.

A sincere, uncynical love film, set in New Zealand, is something completely new from veteran Feng Xiaogang.

STORY

Auckland, New Zealand, the present day. Sui Dongfeng (Huang Xuan) constantly dreams of his beloved late wife, Luo Yun (Yang Caiyu), coming back to him and one day, just as he’s about to set off on a journey, she seems to return briefly in his eyes. He then sets off to drive to Clyde, a small town in the South Island, where he and Luo Yun spent 15 years of their lives and where their best friend, Melinda (Lydia Peckham), lives. (En route Sui Dongfeng remembers how they had bought a remote house outside Clyde, as Luo Yun liked the peace and quiet of the countryside. They had decided to open a Chinese restaurant, Yun’s Chopsticks 芸家馆子, in town.) In Clyde, Sui Dongfeng visits Melinda, and her adopted daughter Kacey (Kindekel Banda-Moyes), whom he hasn’t seen for two years. Melinda says she guessed Luo Yun had passed away when she stopped calling. (Melinda had volunteered as a waitress when she saw them setting up the restaurant. Three years later she had paid off her student loan and gone to India for seven months. On her return she had worked as a substitute teacher, and part-time in the restaurant. Two years later she’d visited Kenya, stayed to teach English, and a year later had returned with Kacey whom she’d adopted. On the restaurant’s fifth anniversary Melinda had been travelling again but sent a postcard; Luo Yun had replied that she was pregnant. However, she was later diagnosed with a uterine tumour that meant she couldn’t have children. Nine years after opening the restaurant, an unpleasant episode with a drunk customer [Stephen Ure] had made Sui Dongfeng and Luo Yun think about moving on. Sui Dongfeng had suggested that, as business was good, they should give it a couple of years more. Next, they’d been hit by the death of their beloved dog, Blue, who was diagnosed with rectal cancer and had to be put down. Melinda had called unexpectedly and invited them to a small town down south where she was teaching in a primary school. During the trip they had all managed to see the Southern Lights, and had made wishes. Back home, however, they had been called one night by the police who told them the restaurant had burned down. So, after 15 years in Clyde, they had sold the house and gone back to Auckland, where Sui Dongfeng had planned to become a police liaison officer.) Sui Dongfeng and Melinda go back to the house and bury an urn of Luo Yun’s ashes in the ground next to Blue. After that they drive to Kaikoura, where Sui Dongfeng hopes to see some blue whales (Luo Yun’s favourite animal) and dispose of the rest of her ashes. As he and a fisherman (Sydney Jackson) wait to see the whales, Sui Dongfeng tells how he and Luo Yun first met. (He was then a student at a language school in Auckland, and doing deliveries for a Chinese restaurant in his spare time. He had rented a room in the house of a Chinese widow from Wuhan, Mrs. Lin [Xu Fan], in which Luo Yun, who worked in a fish market, also had a room. They did not meet for a long time, but when they did they immediately clicked. However, when he’d asked her to marry him, she had refused, saying she was bad luck.)

REVIEW

Released exactly two years after his mega-hit, Youth 芳华 (2017) – a sophisticated, richly-staged riff on Mainland “reminiscence” movies – the New Zealand-set love movie Only Cloud Knows 只有芸知道 seems by comparison a tiny, modest movie by veteran director Feng Xiaogang 冯小刚, with no great ambitions. That, however, is typical of Feng’s career, which has tended to yoyo between contrasting projects. Cloud has its faults but it’s more successful than not, with two strong leads (both from Youth) who carry the film between them, widescreen photography that laps up the spectacular Kiwi landscapes, and a final section that should draw sniffles from the hardest heart. The result was very modest box office of RMB160 million – light years away from Youth’s RMB1.42 billion – but it’s a film that, despite some weaknesses, is nothing to be ashamed of.

Cloud was not intended to follow Youth: Feng’s next film was to have been Cell Phone 2 手机2 (a sequel to his 2003 hit comedy) but production on that suddenly halted in summer 2018 when the tax-evasion scandal centred on lead actress Fan Bingbing 范冰冰 went public, effectively ending Fan’s career in the Mainland (at least for the time being). Less than a year later, during May-Jun 2019, Feng was shooting Cloud in New Zealand, with actor Huang Xuan 黄轩 and actress Yang Caiyu 杨彩玉 in the lead roles, a d.p. (Zhang Yimou 张艺谋 regular Zhao Xiaoding 赵小丁) he’d never worked with before, and a first-time script by novelist Zhang Ling 张翎 (who’d written the original work on which Feng’s earthquake drama Aftershock 唐山大地震 (2010) had been based. Feng had shot a feature overseas before – the comedy Be There or Be Square 不见不散 (1998) in Los Angeles – but in many respects Cloud felt like a veteran film-maker, then 61, making a complete break with his past, almost a new beginning.

And so it turned out. With its remote locations, and only three Chinese players (Huang, Yang, and Feng’s actress wife Xu Fan 徐帆) amid a cast of New Zealand bit-players, Cloud is almost an intimate family movie – a feeling the film seems to encourage. Though it consistently looks fabulous in Zhao’s pristine images that catch the country’s crystalline light and wispy cloudscapes, Cloud is perversely non-commercial in content, quietly celebrating ordinary lives and a mutual love that never wavers. There’s no grand drama here, nor any shouty soul-baring. Some of the dialogue may seem arch, as are sections of the movie, and the structure may strike some viewers as strange; but it is undoubtedly a sincere film, with no trace of the cynicism about human relationships that Feng has consistently shown in the past. Feng has made love stories before – most notably Sigh 一声叹息 (2000) and If You Are the One II 非诚勿扰II (2010) – but this time he’s come up with something completely new.

Following his habit of working with established novelists of his own age (Liu Zhenyun 刘震云, Wang Shuo 王朔, Yan Geling 严歌苓, all born in the late 1950s), Feng has turned this time to Zhang Ling, a Wenzhou-born, now Toronto-based writer in her early 60s who makes her debut as a scriptwriter. As the main titles reveal, Cloud is based on a true story, but it is only at the end that the real characters are revealed (as well as their connection with Feng) in pictures and text that show how different the film and the “true story” are. That aside, Zhang has come up with a script that may be unconventional by some standards – adhering to Feng’s preferred two-act structure rather than a more traditional three acts – but still works its emotional magic in the final stages. If Youth didn’t quite pluck the heartstrings as strongly as it should have, and lacked a really strong narrative spine, Cloud delivers on both counts – though in a much quieter and less showy way.

The whole film is framed as a reminiscence by a Beijing-born, Auckland-based Chinese, Sui Dongfeng (Huang), about his beloved young wife Luo Yun (Yang), who passed way recently but whom he still dreams of. The film’s main spine is a trip he makes to the small town of Clyde, in the South Island, with two small urns of her ashes – one to bury in the grounds of a remote house they lived in for 15 years and the other to scatter in the sea near some blue whales (his wife’s favourite animal). There he re-meets their best friend, the peripatetic, modern hippy Melinda, and reminisces on their past lives. The flashbacks in the first hour centre on the Chinese restaurant the couple set up in Clyde; those in the second hour go back to how they first met in Auckland, at a boarding house run by a widow from Wuhan (Xu). The back-to-front structure almost makes Cloud two separate films stitched into one. But it does work in the grand scheme of things. The first hour is dramatically restrained, with the first real drama only coming 35 minutes in with a drunken customer, and the main event is the death of the couple’s beloved dog, Blue (quite a tear-jerker for any animal lover). In contrast, the second half, set some time earlier, has a much lighter tone as the two leads meet cute in a boarding house, almost like a youthful rom-com.

The audience already knows the characters well by now, including their eventual fates, so the switch in tone is welcome – as well as revealing new skills by the two leading actors. Some of Zhang’s dialogue, especially in the first half, is a tad arch, as are some of the situations; and the script is occasionally too novelistic for its own good (Melinda’s story in the first half; the gambling bet in the second half). But it’s kept watchable by the natural chemistry between the two leads (both, coincidentally, former dancers), with Yang (who played the very different role of a vain, self-serving Shanghaier in Youth) terrific as the soulful Luo Yun and Huang (the selfless male lead in Youth) mutually supportive as the loving husband whose “whole life is entwined with her”. (Alas, their English dialogue, of which there’s a reasonable amount, is not so natural, with Huang’s especially awkward.) In the second half, Xu helps to chivvy along the lighter tone with a playful performance as the landlady, played in a rich Wuhan accent (Xu’s native one). Kiwi actress Lydia Peckham, who’s played a couple of supporting roles in local films, is fine as the couple’s best friend, ever-so-subtly hinting at an attraction to the husband that’s left hanging in the air.

The pleasant score by Dong Gang 董刚 underpins the visuals without adding much extra. Editing by Zhang Qi 张琪 (Youth) is smooth throughout. The film’s strange English title tries to mirror the pun in the Chinese one, which literally means “Only Yun Knows”. The heroine’s given name, Yun 芸, is pronounced identically to the word for cloud, yún 云, but is written slightly differently and means “rue” (the medicinal herb). In one scene, her husband jokes that they are well suited to each other, as his given name, Dongfeng, means “eastern wind” and hers sounds like “cloud”. The names of the real characters who inspired the film were Zhang Shu 张述 and Luo Yang 罗洋.

CREDITS

Presented by Zhejiang Dongyang Alibaba Pictures (CN), Zhejiang Dongyang Mayla Media (CN), Emperor Film Production (HK), Huayi Brothers Pictures (CN), Alibaba Pictures (Beijing) (CN).

Script: Zhang Ling. Photography: Zhao Xiaoding. Aerial photography: Gao Shuai. Editing: Zhang Qi. Music: Dong Gang. Art direction: Wang Kuo. Styling: Lei Shuyu. Sound: Wu Jiang. Executive direction: Zeng Jinwei, Zhao Zuxiang.

Cast: Huang Xuan (Sui Dongfeng/Simon), Yang Caiyu (Luo Yun/Jennifer), Lydia Peckham (Melinda), Xu Fan (Mrs. Lin), Zhang Hongjie (Luo Yun’s father), Zhao Shuzhen (Luo Yun’s mother), Ru Ping (Luo Yun’s elder sister), Carl Bland (owner of house), Sydney Jackson (fisherman), Stephen Ure (drunk in restaurant), Simone Walker (Karen, house buyer), Aaron Richardson (John, house buyer), Daniel Sing (Asian driver), Liz Mullane (Jo, fisherman’s wife), Kindekel Banda-Moyes (Kacey, Melinda’s adopted daughter), Mike Legge, Louise Joyce (old couple in restaurant), Finlay Tomkins (teenage boy with dog), Jocelyn Christian (vet), Denise Snoad (pet owner at vet’s), Tiana Ngata, Harrison Coe (schoolchildren), David Oakley (fireman), Steve O’Reilly (Ballentine, policeman), Crystal Wu (Mrs. Lin’s grand-daughter), Phoebe McKellar (Phoebe, stripper).

Release: China, 20 Dec 2019; Hong Kong, 11 Jun 2020.