Jacky Cheung and Tang Wei in Crossing Hennessy

Ivy Ho has written screenplays for a number of Hong Kong films, two of which — Comrades, Almost A Love Story (1996) and July Rhapsody (2001) –  rank amongst my favorite Chinese films of all time. I haven’t had a chance to watch Ho’s directorial debut, Claustropobia (2008), but when I heard that Jacky Cheung and Lust, Caution’s Tang Wei would be starring in her second film, Crossing Hennessy, I just had to check it out.

And now I have.

To be honest, I really wanted to love Crossing Hennessy, but in the end, I only kind of liked it. The premise certainly intrigued me. In the film, two people are forced by their respective guardians to meet up, albeit with the added expectation that maybe the two of them will get hitched sometime in the near future. One problem — both the man and the woman are “involved” with other people. Forty-year-old bachelor (but not virgin) Loy (Jacky Cheung) lives at home and is still hung up on his childhood ex (Maggie Cheung Ho-Yee), while Oi Lin (Tang Wei) has a hot-tempered boyfriend named Xu (Andy On) who’s biding his time in jail. With Loy’s ex now single again, and Xu soon to be released, it’s no surprise that our protagonists’ hearts are elsewhere.

(more…)