This title marks not just the directorial debut of Taiwanese singer Rene Liu and is also Netflix’s first original Chinese-language film. It also has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, mainly because so few accredited critics have reviewed. Still I wasn’t expecting too much as I had it pegged as a sappy love story and that turned out to be precisely what it is.
This film recounts the relationship between Lin Jianqing and Fang Xiaoxiao across some ten years, flip-flopping between the past and the present. They first meet as university students travelling back to their home town from Beijing for Chinese New Year. The train breaks down mid-journey and the group decide to walk, becoming good friends. This sets the tone for the rest of the film as it shows scenes of how they pass the festival over the following years. Xiaoxiao grows close to Jianqing’s father in their home town and both decide to remain in Beijing to make money after graduation. At first, Xiaoxiao is determined to find and marry a Beijing native with a home in the city but as time passes and she is forced to move in with Jianqing, they give in to their feelings and become a couple. But financial difficulties and the pressures of living in the expensive city and keeping up with their peers damages their relationship.
On a technical level, this film is impeccable, surprisingly so as Liu has no prior directorial experience. Lighting, color palette, and camera work all demonstrate real artistic merit and competence. I love the sets, especially as the film is willing to show the main characters living amidst believable urban squalor, the one room that they stay in just one of many packed into one floor for example. The moment to moment scenes are decent as well with a good eye for storytelling detail, stuff like Jianqing being frustrated at his dead-end call center job; or them hustling a living by selling pirated software and Japanese porn. Zhou Dongyu, who we last saw in the rather good Soul Mate, as Xiaoxiao is a better actress than the male lead though I’m getting a little tired of the sassy girlfriend trope. Yet the excellent production values can’t change the fact that the entire film is premised on a conception of romantic relationships that is utterly childish and nonsensical.
As my wife, who actually does enjoy love stories, notes, only adolescents still believe that people longingly look back on relationships with their exes with such wistful fondness. Actual adults know that everyone moves on eventually with their lives. This film makes it worse for itself by having incredibly sappy dialogue that doubles down on this rose-tinted view of the past, with howlingly bad lines that no one would ever speak in real life. It then tacks on the usual ‘don’t be remiss in visiting your aged parents back home’ message. To us in Malaysia, it feels exactly like the spate of commercials we get during festival season. There’s no subtlety at all and frankly gets extremely annoying very quickly. Personally I was also very annoyed by how the story is told completely from Jianqing’s point of view and the character of Xiaoxiao exists only as the perfect missed opportunity for him. She has no family of her own to speak of and so spends every Chinese New Year with Jianqing’s family instead. There is a mention of her own ailing father near the beginning and then he is never spoken of again. It’s ridiculous how unbalanced this portrayal is.
The decent visuals make this a not unpleasant watching experience but the awful writing and juvenile treatment of romantic relationships make it impossible for me to recommend this to anyone. Judging by the stellar reviews this film has garnered, there are plenty of people who disagree with me but I dearly hope that those are not serious critics.