Dearest

亲爱的

Hong Kong/China, 2014, colour, 2.35:1, 128 mins.

Director: Chen Kexin 陈可辛 [Peter Chan].

Rating: 6/10.

Strongly cast child-abduction drama is let down by a bumpy, contrived script.

STORY

Shenzhen, Guangdong province, southern China, 18 Jul 2009. Tian Wenjun (Huang Bo) runs a small internet cafe-cum-shop in Nanshan district, southwest Shenzhen, and has custody of his three-year-old son Tian Peng, aka Pengpeng (Zhou Pinrui), from his previous marriage to Lu Xiaojuan (Hao Lei). After spending the afternoon with Pengpeng, Lu Xiaojuan returns him to Tian Wenjun and leaves. While Tian Wenjun is distracted by some loutish youngsters in the covered market, Pengpeng goes off with some kids his own age but then never returns. The police eventually find some CCTV footage of him being abducted. Tian Wenjun offers a reward on the internet but attracts a lot of fortune-seekers. A year later he follows a false trail to Shantou, in eastern Guangdong province, and then another to Hebei province, in northern China. Meanwhile, Lu Xiaojuan’s relationship with her second husband (Zhang Guoqiang) has started to suffer, and Tian Wenjun is about to lose his space in the covered market. He takes her to a missing-child support group, run by Han Dezhong (Zhang Yi) who, with his wife Fan Yun (Zhang Yuqi), also lost a child some years earlier. The group travels to Chaohai, but nothing comes of it. Two years later, in summer 2012, Tian Wenjun is now offering a RMB200,000 reward. Following a tip-off, he and Lu Xiaojuan, plus Han Dezhong, travel to a tiny village in Anhui province, eastern China, where they spot a child whom they believe to be Pengpeng, now six. They manage to seize the child, despite being chased by the mother, Li Hongqin (Zhao Wei). The local police chief (Yu Ailei) establishes that Li Hongqin’s late husband, Yang Mingfu, was a suspected child trafficker. After telling Li Hongqin she was infertile, he gave her not only Pengpeng (whom she named Jigang) but also a young girl, Jifang (Li Yiqing), to foster, saying they were both found abandoned in Shenzhen. DNA tests prove that Jigang (Zhu Zimo) is actually Pengpeng, though he doesn’t recognise Tian Wenjun or Lu Xiaojuan. Jifang is sent to a state orphanage in Shenzhen, and Li Hongqin is given a six-month prison sentence. However, after leaving prison, Li Hongqin is determined to win custody of Jifang.

REVIEW

Though smoothly shot and strongly cast, Dearest 亲爱的, by Hong Kong director Chen Kexin 陈可辛 [Peter Chan], unfortunately fails to touch the heartstrings in the way it obviously intends, thanks to a bumpy script by Zhang Ji 张冀, who wrote Chen’s previous American Dreams in China 中国合伙人 (2013), and an over-heated score by Gao Shizhang 高世章 (who contributed to Chen’s Perhaps Love 如果•爱, 2005, and The Warlords 投名状, 2007) that are both more suitable to TV drama than a two-hour-plus widescreen movie. Inspired, like American Dreams, by real-life people and events, the Mainland-set child abduction drama is the most socially-oriented of Chen’s dozen-or-so features to date but in many respects his least emotionally convincing. Despite solid playing by Huang Bo 黄渤 and Hao Lei 郝蕾 as an abducted boy’s parents, and a game performance by Zhao Wei 赵薇 as the peasant who innocently fosters him, the film has a contrived, button-pressing feel rather than that of a naturally evolving drama.

Zhang, who also scripted American Dreams, comes from a background in TV drama writing, which fitted the episodic, long-limbed American Dreams okay but starts running into serious problems in Dearest during the final hour, when the story settles down back in Shenzhen and the characters’ destinies should start being resolved. Zhang’s attempts to interweave new characters (a cynical young lawyer, a construction worker), as well as develop earlier ones (a support-group head and his wife, the abducted boy’s step-father), are clumsy, and distract from the central trio. There are signs that editing may partly be to blame for the film’s lop-sided construction, and that some binding material disappeared in getting it down to its present length. In which case, further cutting could only improve Dearest: at 100-or-so minutes – tightly focused on the central trio, re-scored, and without the documentary ending – it could perhaps be a more involving drama.

The recurrent problem for the viewer is where to place one’s sympathies. The first 45 minutes, showing the boy’s disappearance, and the father’s attempts to find him via the internet as he chases one false lead after another, clearly establish the parents as the film’s emotional focus, especially as they edge closer together while dealing with the situation. At the hour mark, the movie’s top-billed star (Zhao) finally appears and the focus shifts to her, playing a simple Anhui peasant who was tricked by her late husband into fostering the boy, plus a girl the same age. After she’s done a small stint in prison, Zhao’s character re-emerges to take over the movie as she fights for custody not of the boy (now proved decisively to be the parents’) but of the girl, whose parents can’t be traced. Halfway through the movie, the audience is asked to transfer its sympathies to a completely new set of relationships just when the original ones were getting interesting.

It’s not a recipe for an emotionally involving drama spread over two hours or more: aside from its unsteady focus and absence of any clear through-line, the screenplay also lacks dramatic momentum in the second half, especially as Zhao’s character, hardly sympathetic in the first place, is clearly fighting a losing battle. A final twist, which should be emotionally powerful, ends up being so-what, and the film’s ending, in which the real-life characters are shown along with director Chen and the crew, looks like an attempt to provide an ending to a script that doesn’t have one. The combined cast just manages to give an extra point to what, in script terms, is only a 5/10 movie.

Zhao, in convincing make-up and performing for the first time in her native Anhui accent rather than standard Mandarin, does her best with a teary/tough role that’s almost unplayable as written. Her best scenes are as a naive but focused young peasant woman in the Big City, though that’s a standard character in Mainland cinema and her determination is weakened by the obvious hopelessness of her case. Comedian Huang, here playing absolutely straight, has some surprisingly tender moments as the flawed but kindly father, and plays off especially well against Hao (Summer Palace 颐和园, 2006; Mystery 浮城谜事, 2012) as his edgy ex-wife. Also good, though stuck in a jerkily developed role, is TV actor Zhang Yi 张译 (the undercover soldier in An Inaccurate Memoir 匹夫, 2012) as the head of a support group who finds the strain a bit too much.

Other players are also strong, including Zhang Yuqi 张雨绮 (CJ7 长江7号, 2008; White Deer Plain 白鹿原, 2012) in a surprisingly small role as the wife of Zhang Yi’s character; Yu Ailei 余皑磊 (the murdered cop in Black Coal, Thin Ice 白日焰火, 2014) as a no-nonsense regional detective; and veteran director Huang Jianxin 黄建新 (Chen’s business partner in We Pictures) as the benign but tough head of a state orphanage. The only glaring weakness in the cast is Tong Dawei 佟大为 (the third of the American Dreams trio) whose overplaying of a cynical young lawyer hardly helps an already annoying character.

Aside from Gao’s misjudged, tear-jerker score, ladelled onto already heated moments, technical credits are good, with widescreen photography by Taiwan’s Zhou Shuhao 周书豪 (The Robbers 我的唐朝兄弟, 2009; The Piano in a Factory 钢的琴, 2010) and Mainland Steadicam d.p. Yang Zhenyu 杨振宇 (Wu Xia 武侠, 2011; The Guillotines 血滴子, 2012; The Crossing: Part 1 太平轮  上集, 2014) equally versatile in more and less formal compositions and locations. Editing within sequences by Hong Kong’s Xu Hongyu 许宏宇 [Derek Hui] is smooth enough.

[Six months later, another drama on Mainland child abduction was released, Lost and Love 失孤, directed by Peng Sanyuan 彭三源 and starring Liu Dehua 刘德华 (Andy Lau) and Jing Boran 井柏然.]

CREDITS

Presented by We Pictures (HK), Alibaba Pictures Group (CN), Stellar Mega Films (CN), Beijing Enlight Pictures (CN). Produced by We Pictures (HK).

Script: Zhang Ji. Photography: Zhou Shuhao, Yang Zhenyu. Editing: Xu Hongyu [Derek Hui]. Music: Gao Shizhang, Dou Peng. Title song: Chen Fuming. Art direction: Sun Li. Costume design: Wu Lilu [Dora Ng]. Sound: Yang Yuhui, Huang Zheng. Action: Huang Weiliang [Jack Wong], Cai Guoping. Visual effects: Weng Guoxian (yinyung.co).

Cast: Zhao Wei (Li Hongqin), Huang Bo (Tian Wenjun), Tong Dawei (Gao Xia), Hao Lei (Lu Xiaojuan), Zhang Yi (Han Dezhong), Zhang Yuqi (Fan Yun, Dezhong’s wife), Huang Jianxin (Fan, the orphanage head), Yu Ailei (Liu Xiangdong, the police inspector), Zhang Guoqiang (Qin Hao, Lu Xiaojuan’s second husband), Zhu Zimo [Zhu Dongxu] (Tian Peng/Yang Jigang, aged six), Zhou Pinrui (Tian Peng, aged three), Li Yiqing (Jifang), Yuan Zhongyuan (intermediate court judge).

Premiere: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition), 28 Aug 2014.

Release: China, 26 Sep 2014; Hong Kong, 22 Jan 2015.

(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 31 Aug 2014.)