Fall For You (2001)



	Fall for You		Return to Review Archive - F
	Year:	2001	Kristy Yeung gets a lift from Francis Ng
	Director:	Cha Yuen-Yee
	Cast:	Francis Ng Chun-Yu, Kristy Yeung Kung-Yu
	The Skinny:	Bizarre and ultimately interminable romantic comedy/drama, which possesses odd plot devices that make absolutely no sense. Stars Francis Ng and Kristy Yeung should have their heads examined for agreeing to appear in this picture.
	Review by Kozo:	Utterly strange comedy/drama starring an unlikely pairing: Francis Ng and Kristy Yeung. Ng stars as struggling artist (he paints) who lives in the city of love and infrequent bathing: Paris, France. He loves the city, but may have to leave due to his lack of any real success. Meanwhile, Yeung plays a gold-digging young thing who wishes to marry a rich man - which is the sum totality of her wordly ambition. The two displaced Chinese meet under contrived circumstances, and somehow a romance starts. Then it sits there like a lump. You could fill Madison Square Garden with the inane goings-on in this film. Fall for You is full of bizarre, uninteresting details which serve no true function. Case in point: Francis Ng's sexual problem, which is that he blacks out after intercourse. The implication made is that one day he will die after getting lucky (plot point alert!), but he goes ahead and screws with his models - and later Yeung - anyway. The message here could be that passion supplants all other forms of sustenance, including love or money. Or, the detail could simply be the product of someone's twisted and completely nonsensical imagination. Whatever intent existed behind this film, it's clear that filmmaker Cha Yuen-Yee is extremely talented. You'd have to be talented to waste a French location, actor Francis Ng, and eye candy supreme Kristy Yeung - and Cha does in grand fashion. The plot seems random, the characters are uninteresting, and the acting is far below standard. Ng turns in a quirky performance, but without a proper grounding for his character, it appears as if he's just mugging for no particular reason. Yeung fares much worse, as she's borderline unlikable and frequently shrill. She's a fine supporting player, but isn't a credible lead here. Not that it matters. The whole production - while genial and pleasant - is just boring and meaningless. It's strange that Cha Yuen-Yee could have made this mess, because he put together the excellent triad deconstruction comedies Once Upon a Time in Triad Society 1 and 2 (which both starred Francis Ng). However, when reminded that Cha also directed Category III softcore stinkers like Take Me (starring Veronica Yip) and Basic Impulse (not starring Veronica Yip), the failure of this film seems an obvious result. (Kozo 2001)
	Availability:	DVD (Hong Kong) Region 0 NTSC Mei Ah Laser Widescreen Cantonese and Mandarin Language Tracks English and Chinese Subtitles

		image courtesy of www.u333.com
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