Ex

前度

Hong Kong, 2010, colour, 2.35:1, 100 mins.

Director: Mai Xiyin 麦曦茵 [Heiward Mak].

Rating: 7/10.

Actress Zhong Xintong [Gillian Chung] shines in a charming relationships movie with a light touch.

STORY

Hong Kong, the present day. About to leave on holiday together, Zhou Yi (Zhong Xintong) and her Taiwan travel-writer boyfriend Yang Baishu (Zhou Junwei) have an argument at the airport and Zhou Yi dumps him. By chance, she gets a lift back into the city from her boyfriend of six years ago, designer-turned producer Chen Junping (Chen Weiting), who’s just returned from abroad and been met by his partner Dai Peishi (Wei Shiya). With nowhere to stay (her landlady won’t let her back and her friends are all away) and no job (she resigned to go on holiday), Zhou Yi ends up staying with Chen Junping and Dai Peishi, stirring memories of her past on-off relationship with him.

REVIEW

Ex 前度 has a terrific opening, a good middle section, and an okay final stretch, justifying some of the local praise heaped on young Hong Kong writer-director Mai Xiyin 麦曦茵 [Heiward Mak], 25, following her first film, teenage drama High Noon 烈日当空 (2008), and now this. Mai has a good ear for natural dialogue – she’s aso contributed to the comedies Men Suddenly in Black 2 大丈夫2 (2006) and Love in a Puff 志明与春娇 (2010) – but what’s more remarkable about Ex is its confident sense of structure and her ability to pretty much sustain the emotional tone of the film without lapsing into goofy comedy or digressions.

The opening, set in the gleaming white expanses of Hong Kong’s Chiliejiao [Chek Lap Kok] airport, immediately alerts the audience to what’s coming: a beautifully paced conversation between a young couple in which hidden jealousies and deceptions come to the surface and are overheard by another young couple who turn out to have a stake in the conversation. Once the story is set up, as the impulsive Zhou Yi (played by Zhong Xintong 钟欣潼 [Gillian Chung]) temporarily lodges with her quieter ex-boyfriend Chen Junping (Chen Weiting 陈伟霆), the script starts stirring in neatly triggered flashbacks to their previous relationship, as two in-love youngsters in a New Territories village outside the city. As the film flips back and forth between the sterile, black-and white flat of the present to their colourfully decorated pad of the past, the two characters are slowly allowed to grow through a variety of small incidents, while the script also takes in Zhou Yi’s past relationship with a young triad, her first meeting with the boyfriend she dumped at the start, and a taxi-driving musician friend of Chen Junping.

The film doesn’t have a straightforward three-act structure, which makes it even more amazing that Mai manages to sustain interest in what is essentially a kind of emotional rondo centred on one character. (Mai’s [so far unpublished] original novel was from the points-of-view of different characters.) Given Chen’s rather bland, metrosexual playing of the underwritten Chen Junping, the movie would never have worked without Zhong’s lead performance, which imbues a stereotypically capricious, easily bored young Hong Konger with a genuine charm, a killer smile and some real sadness. In her first leading role since her enforced lay-off following the Chen Guanxi 陈冠希 [Edison Chen] sex-photos scandal in early 2008, Zhong has finally, in her late 20s, graduated to a part which throws off her squeaky-clean Twins image and allows her to show the makings of a real actress: just for starters, the scenes of her growing sexual re-attraction to Chen Junping are beautifully played.

Zhong gets better-than-solid support from both Wei Shiya 卫诗雅 as Chen Junping’s partner and Zeng Guoxiang 曾国祥 [Derek Tsang] as the driver/musician – with Wei, especially, blooming late on – and manages to hold her own against cameos by Taiwan veteran Tian Niu 恬妞 (as her mother) and notorious scene-stealer Du Wenze 杜汶泽 [Chapman To] (here also producing). Mai’s movie doesn’t say anything new about relationships, doesn’t plumb any emotional depths, and would have benefited from more development of Wei’s character. But it entertains in an adult, likeable way and proves that movies about young Hong Kongers don’t have to be totally aimless, needlessly violent or annoyingly superficial.

CREDITS

Presented by Emperor Motion Pictures (HK). Produced by Rex Film Productions (HK).

Script: Mai Xiyin [Heiward Mak]. Novel: Mai Xiyin [Heiward Mak]. Photography: Ke Xingpei [O Sing-pui]. Editing: Ye Wanting. Music: Lin Erwen. Art direction: Zhang Zhaokang. Sound: Lin Xueyu.

Cast: Zhong Xintong [Gillian Chung] (Zhou Yi), Chen Weiting (Chen Junping), Wei Shiya (Dai Peishi/Cee), Zeng Guoxiang [Derek Tsang] (Su Hanxiang/Sol), Zhou Junwei (Yang Baishu/Woody), Xiang Zuo [Jacky Heung] (Sheng, young triad), Du Wenze [Chapman To] (Du, doctor), Wu Haokang (Dai Peishi’s former boyfriend), Lin Erwen (Lin, landlady), Liang Xiaofeng (Andrew, editor), Tian Niu (Zhou Yi’s mother).

Premiere: Hong Kong Film Festival (Co-Closing Film), 6 Apr 2010.

Release: Hong Kong, 10 Jun 2010.

(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 2 Aug 2010.)