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Review
by Kozo: |
Director
Derek Chiu helms Love Trilogy, a trio of interwoven
tales exploring the various stages of male-female relationships.
Francis Ng and Anita Yuen play Mark and Chui, a low-income
Hong Kong couple celebrating their seventh anniversary.
Unfortunately, Mark has just had his driving license
suspended, making his job as a taxi driver somewhat
moot. Their anniversary trip to Kunming is fraught with
bickering and discussions of a possible divorce. At
the same time, their partnership reveals some surprising
tenderness to go along with the expected difficulties.
Countering Mark and Chui are
a Mainland couple (Han Xio and Lu Yi), who are also
on the same tour of Kunming. This couple seems to be
experiencing difficulties thanks to their newlywed status;
their troubles are more a function of newlywed hypersensitivity
than aged familiarity. They at first seem to be fighting
over the expected issues (freedom of choice, imposing
one's will on their partner), but their disagreements
lend themselves to larger, and possibly irreparable
repercussions.
Rounding
things out are a Korean couple who are not yet married.
Jino (Oh Ji-Ho) is respectful of the covenant of marriage,
but realizes that he and his girlfriend (Yun Ye-Ri)
may not be suited for each other. Easily the most likable
and positive character in the film, Jino is also enamored
of Shangri-La, and wishes to travel there from Kunming
to explore the culture written about in his favorite
novel, "Lost Horizon" by James Hilton. However,
his girlfriend doesn't want to go with him—which
turns out to be just the starting of their potential
differences.
Written by UFO screenwriter
Aubrey Lam, Love Trilogy is at once literate
and noticeably contrived. The film makes numerous references
to literary works thanks to the presence of Liu Hai
(Ruby Lin), a tour guide who sometimes doubles as a
marriage counselor. The references, while suitably telling,
are also a little didactic. Likewise, the conflicts
occasionally reek of hackneyed melodrama. Still, Lam's
eye for detail in relationships and characters is remarkably
strong. Her couples fight over the most minor of things,
but their fuming almost always speaks to larger, unspoken
issues between them. Occasionally those issues are brought
to the verbal forefront, but more often they're negotiated
via offscreen interaction or unspoken mutual understandings.
The couples on display in Love Trilogy aren't
always likable, as they screech and scream a little
too much to be lovable movie couples, but they do seem
real and even compelling.
Director Derek Chiu has
been responsible for a variety of films (Comeuppance, The Log, Frugal Game), each one managing
to find some thematic grounding within their genre classifications. Love Trilogy is different in that it's not a
typical Hong Kong Cinema genre, but a more overt example
of art-house type cinema. The locations, dialogue-heavy
long takes, and reliance on emotional performance all
add up to a cinematic experience far removed from the
usual crass commercial vehicles cranked out by the Hong
Kong Cinema machine. The effect is tiresome but worthwhile; Love Trilogy is languidly paced and full of ostensible
pessimism, but it also finds decent drama beneath the
howling and hollering of its sometimes unlikable couples.
At the same time, the messages the film implies (love
needs to be risked, marriage is not a picnic) are handed
out a little too obviously. There's complexity in the
characters, but the total aim of the film doesn't seem
to be rocket science.
Still, knocking Love
Trilogy for its easy explanations is probably rougher
criticism than the film truly deserves. As mentioned
earlier, Aubrey Lam has a fine eye for relationship
and character detail, and Derek Chiu handles matters
with a refreshingly hands-off approach. Much of the
characters is left for the audience to discover, and
as such Love Trilogy is infinitely more rewarding
than, say, Silver Hawk. It also displays a rare
intimacy and intelligence, and features acting that
feels genuine, if not out-and-out excellent. The film
is presented in a mixture of Cantonese, Mandarin, English
and Korean, and as such the acting appears rougher than
your normal film. Still, the ensemble cast (anchored
heavily by award winners Francis Ng and Anita Yuen)
uniformly seem grounded in reality. Love Trilogy is not world-beating arthouse fare, but it's a refreshing
alternative to the popstar fluff that Hong Kong normally
produces. (Kozo 2004) |
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