Berlinale. Zuo You (In Love We Trust).

Well into Zuo You, one of Wang Xiaoshuai characters remarks that he feels like he's in some soap opera. The woman sitting across from him in the café snaps back: "I don't care." But some viewers, myself included, just might. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with soap operas. For melodrama to work, though, you can't skimp on the drama. I wouldn't want to trip over the intentional fallacy, but that very idea does seem to be what Wang is experimenting with here. Suppose you were to map out a set of simple plot points, open and plain for all to see almost from the get-go, and then marry that story to the long-take naturalism of currently fashionable festival fare? In Zuo You at least, the result is a disappointingly bland neither/nor.

Very quickly, the story: a married couple learns their five-year-old daughter has leukemia. Treatment after treatment fails. All that's left to try is a bone marrow transplant. With no other feasible donors at hand, the mother (Liu Weiwei) decides to give her daughter a baby brother or sister. Problem: She's in her second marriage. So is the girl's father (Zhang Jiayi). All four adults struggle with the mother's insistence that this baby be conceived - after artificial insemination fails, too, of course.

In interviews, Wang has said, "I didn't want my story to be typically Chinese. My idea is to give the impression of a normal, ordinary life that could have taken place in any country." He's succeeded, and I think he's to be commended for it, too. The obstacle of the one-child policy aside (brought up only briefly as a possible objection from the mother's second husband (Cheng Taishen) to her plans), this Beijing is just one more globalized, pollution-gray, anonymous megalopolis. And the performances - Yu Nan, by the way, plays the girls' real father's second wife - are more than passable all around. Otherwise, Zuo You is a remarkably long two hours.

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"The maudlin film manages to stage its series of painful domestic conversations inventively, but long takes that cleverly shift focus were not enough to distract me from the obviousness with which the melodramatic gears are turning," writes Jürgen Fauth.

"[W]hile his four main actors deliver diamond performances and the undercurrents of their conflicting feelings are perfectly calibrated, Wang's habit of keeping narrative rhythm at an even keel, the dour colors and the deliberate muffling of emotional intensity make the overall cinematic result a bit anemic," writes Maggie Lee in the Hollywood Reporter.

"Sixth Generation director Wang Xiaoshuai presents what can only be described as natural tearjerker material - leukaemia, divorce, infidelity - in the milieu of the Chinese middle class and delivers an uneven picture which attempts the impossible and fails to deliver it long before the final stretch," writes Dan Fainaru for the Hollywood Reporter.

Posted by dwhudson at February 9, 2008 11:53 AM