Film review: mainland romance But Always takes its cue from Comrades: A Love Story
This is a "will they, won't they?" romantic drama, whose mainland protagonists suffer missed chances at love during years of futile longing. There are historical events serving as temporal signposts, an inauspicious ending in New York, and even a postscript that links the lovers back to an unnoticed chance meeting that marked the start of their lifelong destiny.
Starring: Nicholas Tse Tingfung, Gao Yuanyuan, Qin Hao
Director: Snow Zou Xian
Category: IIA (Putonghua, Cantonese and English)
This is a "will they, won't they?" romantic drama, whose mainland protagonists suffer missed chances at love during years of futile longing. There are historical events serving as temporal signposts, an inauspicious ending in New York, and even a postscript that links the lovers back to an unnoticed chance meeting that marked the start of their lifelong destiny.
In fact, But Always sounds like a really intriguing movie — a movie called Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996).
Unlike Peter Chan Ho-sun's classic film about love, fate and the Chinese diasporic experience, veteran producer Snow Zou Xian's directorial debut is a crudely scripted (also by Zou) yarn that wastes the usually reliable duo of Nicholas Tse Ting-fung and Gao Yuanyuan in a dreary tale.
But Always' director-scriptwriter may have graduated from New York's Pace University, but this doesn't stop her from creating an exploitative and offensive plot device at her adoptive city's expense.
A decades-spanning story in which the central romance is beset by unfortunate coincidences at virtually every turn, the film opens near the story's end when — at long last, reunited with the love of his life — our romantic hero goes to work in swanky business attire on a peaceful New York morning in 2001.
