ReviewOnly Cloud Knows film review: Feng Xiaogang melodrama prioritises scenic views of New Zealand over dramatic depth
- The story of a middle-class Chinese couple, and how they met and made a life together, Only Cloud Knows is oddly disconnected from its antipodean setting
- The superficial melodrama is held together by the acting of Huang Xuan as a grieving husband looking back, and by a rather obvious soundtrack
2.5/5 stars
Playing out like a Hong Kong movie from the 1980s, superstar Chinese director Feng Xiaogang’s ultra-melodramatic Only Cloud Knows may be too unsophisticated for some viewers. The film lacks dramatic depth and often seems like a promo extolling the beauties of its attractive setting, New Zealand.
The story is told mainly in two flashback sequences. After a short prelude in which the grieving Simon Sui Dongfeng (Huang Xuan) imagines he has summoned the ghost of his deceased wife, Jennifer Luo Yun (Yang Caiyu), to his pretty new home, he heads to his isolated former house near Clyde, on New Zealand’s South Island, to bury her ashes in the place she loved.
The film then moves back in time to show Simon and Jennifer setting up their home in Clyde. Looking for a release from city life, they have moved to the South Island from Auckland, and opened a Chinese restaurant in the small town. Business goes very well, and they befriend their chatty waitress, Melinda (Lydia Peckham), who becomes a big part of their lives.
When Jennifer dies of a terminal illness, the film flashes back to their time in Auckland, and fills in the backstory about how they met, and how they came to be wealthy enough to buy a big house in rural New Zealand. Most of this seems to be down to good fortune – they won the money gambling, and fell in love because they were living in the same building.