Review | Film review: To Love or Not to Love – Venus Wong, Edward Ma in largely harmless Hong Kong romantic comedy
Part campus rom com, part cliched relationship drama, and with some zany turns by Hong Kong comedy veterans, Crosby Yip’s film is a breath of fresh air for audiences used to Patrick Kong’s noxious fare
2.5/5 stars
It’s probably useful to know that writer-director Crosby Yip Hei was just 23 years old when he made this movie.
A sweet and silly campus romantic comedy which morphs halfway into a grown-up relationship drama drowning in embarrassing gender clichés, To Love or Not to Love does play like the brainchild of a Hong Kong teen who has had a limited perspective of the adult world. It’s still a better love story than anything Patrick Kong created early in his career, however.
In a similar fashion to Taiwanese blockbuster You Are the Apple of My Eye and Hong Kong’s own She Remembers, He Forgets , Yip’s crowd-pleasing film starts with the budding romance between innocent high-school student Casey (Venus Wong Man-yik, Good Take Too ) and her troublemaking classmate Elton (Edward Ma Chi-wai, PG Love ).
Despite their wealth gap and contrasting personalities, the pair remain an item after Casey starts college and Elton turns to odd jobs – until they break up abruptly when Elton is caught cheating. The story then picks up four years later, when Casey has, rather unconvincingly, become a famous relationship guru, and Elton is suddenly determined to win her back.