Starring: Li Xiaolu, Mike He Junxiang, Alfred Cheung Kin-ting Director: Alfred Cheung Kin-ting Category: I (Putonghua)
An inventive plot twist, pleasant scenery and attractive stars are not enough to neutralise the phoniness that wafts through this mawkish romance.
It's regrettable that such is the case, for in delineating the relationship between a free-spirited Beijinger and an idealistic Hong Kong motion-picture audio technician, director-writer Alfred Cheung Kin-ting displays a keener sense of script construction than most. The adventure the two embark upon has more than its share of intriguing elements, but these are woefully undercut by an all-consuming artificiality that replaces a viewer's nascent sense of wonder with an urge to slap the screen characters to their senses.
It begins as a road picture, with Bai Ye (Li Xiaolu, right), a sassy RV owner, going on a mysterious expedition accompanied by handsome stranger Ziqi (Mike He Junxiang).
Their journey is rife with banalities, from perky musical underscoring and Bai's pretty-girl petulance to postcard-like backdrops of the Great Wall and a tree house seemingly made-to-order from a high-end speciality shop. Capping matters is the divulgement that one principal is afflicted with a Hollywood-style mortal disease that somehow fails to ravage the sufferer's good looks. But just as one despairs that the road trip is headed for a dead end, the narrative swerves in a direction so novel that even a cynical critic is forced to re-examine his scepticism.
Alas, that burst of optimism is quickly extinguished by a suffocating accumulation of clichee, from the stars' tween-type sexless passion to a patently phoney take on the potentially fascinating topic of the creative process. The isolation of the protagonists, which worked relatively well in the movie's first part, appears more contrived with the locale shifted to an urban centre such as Hong Kong.