Perhaps Love (ScreenDaily Review)

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Perhaps Love (Ruguo Ai)

Lee Marshall in Venice 15 September 2005

Dir: Peter Ho-sun Chan. HK-Ch-Malay. 2005. 108mins.

The seeming Chinese answer to Moulin Rouge, Perhaps Love is a lavish but insubstantial musical love story with pan-Asian cinema and music stars Zhou Xun (Suzhou River, The Little Chinese Seamstress) and Takeshi Kaneshiro (Chungking Express, House Of Flying Daggers) in the Nicole and Ewan roles.

It?s an odd mix: arthouse in its three-strand film-within-a-film plot and open ending, much more traditional in its choreography (by Bollywood supremo Farah Khan) and music, which eschews oriental models for the full-on Andrew Lloyd-Webber experience.

It is neither as innovative nor as outrageous as Luhrmann?s neo-musical: then again, high camp never plays well with Chinese audiences and would also likely run into problems with authorities.

Perhaps Love should perform strongly in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and the burgeoning mainland Chinese market ? one of its key targets - while the presence of Kaneshiro will stir interest in Japan.

But outside of these territories, the obvious stumbling block of Chinese-language songs ? whose lyrics were only poorly rendered in the subtitles of the version that previewed at Venice ? will confine the film?s audience to specialist and niche slots.

A noirish opening sequence, narrated by a melancholy observer called Montage (Korean star Ji Jin-Hee) plunges us straight into the musical-within-a-musical that gives the temporally fragmented plot a veneer of present-day cohesion. Hot new heartthrob Lin Jiang Dong (Kaneshiro) and established diva Sun Na (Zhou Xun) have been paired in a new musical with a 1930s Shanghai circus setting, directed by legendary film-maker Nie Wen (Jacky Cheung).

Lin and Sun knew each other 10 years before, in Beijing, when he was a hard-up film student and she was a bar singer with a waif-like insouciance that seems modelled on the Giulietta Masina of Fellini?s La Strada. But their platonic love affair is spiked when the ambitious Sun leaves Lin for director Nie, who she knows can make her famous.

The present-day action switches back and forth with some elegance between the musical ? in which the love triangle is reproduced, with Nie Wen playing a circusmaster, Sun his trapeze artist lover, and Lin the man from her past ? and the behind-the-scenes drama, in which a still infatuated Lin tries to remind Sun of their affair, and her bar-singer past, which she has cancelled from her official biography and mental hard disk.

The third timeline ? a flashback to that earlier affair ? kicks in when Lin persuades Sun to travel to Beijing with him to refresh her memory (these scenes, set mostly in a disused warehouse, are shot by Chris Doyle, while the rest of the lush cinematography is the work of Oscar-winning Crouching Tiger cinematographee Peter Pau).

The song-and-dance numbers are a grab-bag of references and borrowings, from Busby Berkeley to the Umbrellas Of Cherbourg to Cultural Revolution chic (distilled in the donkey jacket and comrade cap worn by Lin in his embedded musical role); while the final trapeze sequence takes us back to 1950s circus movies like The Greatest Show On Earth.

But though there is undoubted chemistry in the Zhou Xun-Kaneshiro pairing, Perhaps Love suffers from problems with its plotting and the post-modern nature of its receding mirrors structure. In coming on all Wong Kar-wai, it pulls the Rodgers and Hammerstein punch of the true, no-holds-barred romantic musical.

Production companies
Ruddy Morgan
Applause Pictures Production
Astro/Shaw (BHD)
Television Broadcasts
Stellar Megamedia Group
Stellar Mega Film (Beijing)
Shanghai Film Group Corporation
Cina Film Co-production Corporation

International sales
Celestial Pictures

Executive producers
Andre Morgan
Qin Hong
Ren Zhong Lun

Producers
Andre Morgan
Peter Ho-sun Chan

Screenplay
Aubrey Lam
Raymond To

Cinematography
Peter Pau
Chris Doyle

Production design
Yee Chung Man

Editor
Wenders Li
Kong Chi Leung

Original songs
Peter Kam
Leon Ko

Main cast
Takeshi Kaneshiro
Zhou Xun
Jacky Cheung
Ji Jin-hee