If you can, try to ignore the cringing melodrama in A Beautiful Life, Hong Kong director Andrew Lau Wai-keung's first stab at romance and an abrupt departure from his famed Infernal Affairs triad trilogy.
Admittedly, that's hard to do. The characters suffer ail- ments worthy more of an Old Testament plague than a rom-com-slash-drama: blindness, muteness and autism. Then there's the soulful, sad and suffering Beijing cop, Fang Zhendong (Liu Ye), the leading man, who develops premature dementia as well as a broken heart.
However, A Beautiful Life isn't just a tearjerker. The film is one of the first to acknowledge the growing allure of Beijing over Hong Kong. It follows Li Peiru (Shu Qi), a Hong Kong gold-digger, temptress and cutthroat real-estate agent, as she travels to the capital to find her fortune.
In a shimmering karaoke palace, she instead discovers - and, in her drunken state, vomits on - the benevolent Fang, who soon becomes entangled in her exotic charms.
A decade ago, when Beijing was less desirable, this premise would have seemed absurd. When I first moved to the mainland, in 2003, the rare steak in a faux foreign restaurant was served with a side of sloppy, sweet fruit salad - and McDonald's was quite simply the height of decadence. Six years ago, in Hong Kong, I was constantly warned against crossing the border into the dangerous badlands of the mainland.
That was then. Beijing is now inundated with fine-dining restaurants, ostentatious clubs and swaggering, brand-toting new money. And Hongkongers are tapping in. According to the most recent figures released by the Census and Statistics Department, the number of Hong Kong residents living on the mainland has increased by a staggering 70 per cent in the past four years.
