Review | Lost Love movie review: Sammi Cheng, Hong Kong Film Awards best actress nominee, impresses as a grieving mother in affecting foster care drama
- Sammi Cheng puts in one of the best performances of her career in Lost Love, as a grieving mother who fosters children with her husband (Alan Luk)
- Ka Sing-fung’s film is one of the best of Hong Kong cinema’s new wave, calling to mind Hirokazu Koreeda’s work with its child actors’ naturalistic performances
4/5 stars
Hong Kong superstar Sammi Cheng Sau-man gives one of the best performances of her acting career in Lost Love, playing a grieving mother who buries her sorrow by taking in a procession of foster children with often touching, sometimes heartbreaking results.
The pair lead a simple life in their small and cosy flat in a rural village, with an old-fashioned dessert made from ice cream and soft drinks being their only pleasure. Mei sometimes stops to take in the tranquil surroundings of her living environment, and the film often does the same.
It is only about halfway into Lost Love that their secret is laid bare: the couple’s son died of a hereditary heart problem at age three a few years earlier. Despite Bun’s repeated suggestion they try for another child, Mei decides on her own that she’ll devote herself to other children in need instead.
The foster children who temporarily come through Mei’s household vary in age, personality and family background. Some are withdrawn or rebellious; one little girl readily calls her “mama”. Some of their guardians are in hospital or prison, and one mother abandons her own daughter in front of Mei.
The experiences fostering these children prove an emotional minefield for the stern but vulnerable Mei, who must juggle her attachment to the wards with the fact they can never be her own; there’s a big difference between foster care and adoption, as her case supervisor, Miss Mok (Hedwig Tam Sin-yin), apologetically explains.
Punctuated by long silences, unspecified time jumps and empty shots of the scenery where Mei and Bun live, Lost Love, with its elliptical narrative, evokes a dreamlike atmosphere despite its realistic setting.
In its own magical way, it plays like the waking dream of a mother processing her grief in the only way she knows how – with love.
