Don't Believe the Hype

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Good characters, insightful on relationships, especially the main one as it hits its seven year mark with complications. Zhang Yibai maybe tries to be a little too offbeat to tell this simple story, a few too many fade-to-black moments, a thread or two left unresolved, but he is trying to make the realities a little dreamlike and ever so slightly jolting. He repeats scenes from different genesis points. His characters break the fourth wall and address the audience. He does a number of things that I generally dislike but its a sign of his talent that when all is said and done I really enjoyed the film. Jinglei Xu is very charming.

An interesting love story on modern metro lifestyle that takes us on a ride of thoughts. The director succeeds in expressing the unexpressed.This film perfectly fits the bill for the saying 'man has reached the moon but not the heart of the person just a feet away'. It is all about the unexpressed internal conflict but the thoughts of the character's are conveyed with clarity to the audience by means of flashy techniques, and it is here the director scores the points. Predominantly a story of a Beijing couple married for 7 years, and also of two other couples. Jian bin, the husband looses his job but prefers to hide this from his wife and continues to escort her to and from her workplace. A cook having sons, puppies!, develops interest in the wife Xiao Hui and politely puts across the proposal to her in his restaurant. Husband feels jealous and also a complex of inferiority engulfs him and he lies to wife that his boss asked him to go to France. Lies pile up between the couple and they feel the heat of the mental separation while being together. The screenplay is minutely planned and i rate the movie technically high. The transition from scene to scene, with blank frames in between, is odd for a film made in as recent as 2002, but i liked that. The passage/corridor for the couple's home is visually exploited to the maximum by clever use of light. The scenes in the subway coach, where wheel chair and rain is depicted in the hospital, are tenderly handled. The slow pace at times made me feel that am watching an Ismail Merchant film. Freeze technique is impact-fully used where Jian Bin, disturbed by wife's attitude and his own plight, pulls out the table cloth with laid out dinner in the hotel. Artistes performance is good and in closeups they are perfectly expressive. At places during my viewing experience, i found it difficult to catch the flashback/flash forward episodes and feel like revisiting the film.Over all, i good film on many counts.

This movie is definitely not for everyone. The pace is kept deliberately slow, there are very few fast scenes, and the music contributes well to the mood. The actors are decent - nothing extraordinary, but they do a good job with the given script. Xu Jinglei provides nice eye candy. However, the real value of the movie in my view is that it depicts fairly well a young couple who have been together for seven years and the gradual arrival to the point where they feel the passion is lost. My wife felt the premise is not terribly realistic. While we disagreed on that, we both agreed that the silence, mind-games, and guessing each other is depicted very faithfully. Personally, I've met quite a few couples in China who are very similar to the protagonists in this movie. My only criticism is really a quibble. However, occasionally the movie depicts imaginary sequences, especially in the beginning. While these are used to good effect, they made me question most of the scenes later on, whether they were real or just someone's imagination. All in all, still, I'd give it a 7/10. It's an honest film about a young couple in contemporary China.

I love Chinese movies, but this is one of the worst I have seen. the writing is lame and the dialogue seems forced, even though I don't speak Chinese. What is up? If this is what the young guys are doing, I'll stick to the older directors.