Review | Just 1 Day movie review: Charlene Choi, Wong Cho-lam play would-be lovers in a romantic trifle – Erica Li’s directing debut
- Erica Li, in her debut as a director, casts Charlene Choi as a woman in a bad relationship and Wong Cho-lam as an old school friend who’s terminally ill
- In a banal story full of corny ideas Wong’s character, Mosaic, is in love with Angelfish, played by Choi, and asks her to be his girlfriend for a day
2.5/5 stars
It always felt like a matter of time before Erica Li Man directed her first film.
Having begun her career as a pop singer in the late 1980s, Li has remained active in a variety of disciplines and become one of Hong Kong’s most prolific pop culture writers, publishing new work as a Canto-pop lyricist, novelist and screenwriter regularly since the ’90s.
With this directorial debut, co-produced by Yau and adapted from one of her many novels, Li appears to have found a new leash of creative freedom – and her story duly goes into sentimental overdrive.
Choi plays Angelfish, a lovesick bank teller stuck in a tortuous affair with a man (Eric Kwok Wai-leung) who is simultaneously in another long-term relationship.
At an event for primary school alumni, Angelfish is reunited with old pal Mosaic (Wong Cho-lam), an urban sketcher who has always harboured the biggest crush on her.
Mosaic soon makes an awkward admission: he has been diagnosed with the rare motor neurone disease known as ALS, and he wants her to be his girlfriend for one day – before he gradually loses control of his body and dies in a few years’ time.
Li may be in her 50s but she certainly shows no qualms about spelling out every corny idea in the voice-over narration, as when Angelfish repeatedly declares her dream of watching the sunrise with her one true love.
The fateful day duly arrives, and is so innocent and uneventful the film plays like a romantic fairy tale in passing; the episode does, though, feature a welcome role for theatre veteran Tang Shu-wing as a miniature artist.
It would probably feel more like an acting challenge for Wong, a flamboyant comedian by trade, if the film had given him a longer third act in which to impress as an ALS patient. As it stands, Just 1 Day is little more than a sweet trifle.
Even its socially resonant message of how urban renewal has wiped out the memories of generations of people is eclipsed by the waves of sheer banality on display.
