Asian Film Review: 'Break Up Club' (分手說愛你)

On Monday night a few of us were able to check out the HK Premiere of Barbara Wong ( 黃真真)'s latest film 'Break Up Club' (分手說愛你).  I posted my premiere pics here yesterday if you haven't seen them yet.

So here's my brief review --  The film stars Jaycee Chan and Fiona Sit as young couple with a rocky relationship and focus for a 'film within a film'.  

Barbara Wong plays herself as a director making a film about a real life failed relationship and it turns out Joe (Jaycee Chan) is one of the people she interviews in her search for a story.

She gives him a camera and asks him to document his relationship which starts our journey into the story of his relationship with Flora (Fiona Sit).  At this point much of the story is told via shaky camera work as Jaycee and his friends film themselves as he explains his story.

Despite being an mildly employed lazy bum, Jaycee for the most part is an earnest romantic guy who's fixated on his lost love.  The film utilizes a somewhat cheap plot device to move the story forward, which is a website (conveniently called www.breakupclub.asia), which promises to reunite your lost love, but the price is you must ruin a friend's relationship in the process.  Despite being a gimmick, the film uses this plot device to good comedic effect.   Some of the films' best parts come from the rapid fire comedic writing revolving around the breaking up and reuniting of Joe and his friends.

The film majorly shifts gears in the second half,  and stops being about the film or the magical website... and descends into... gasp.... typical romantic comedy hell...  as the couple inevitably has to have its 3rd act conflict... in this case in the form of handsome multilingual artist Lies Hayama (played by Hiro Hayama, and modeled after real life HK graffiti artist L1es One)

For some reason there's no stills of Hiro's scenes on the official site.  So instead I'll stick one more of Fiona Sit up:

Anyway, I started getting a bit miffed when the film went too far into the love triangle stuff... I felt like it had lost its way... like a (bad) Korean comedy,  it forgets it started as a comedy and becomes a super emo break-up story....  (boring for me, but I suppose the girls in the audience would love it).   I think a good 20 minutes could have been trimmed out to keep things a bit lighter (the film runs well over 2 hours).  But luckily there's a really nice bit of writing demonstrated to rescue the film from being a disaster... instead its one of those movies that makes you want to get the DVD so you can rewatch it...   

I'm a big fan of movies that DON'T just do what you expect,  so any time you get a nice twist, I'm happy.  I'll give this movie a 7/10 (high for me!)  Both Jaycee and Fiona do a good job being emotive and convincing you of their character's behavior.

Definitely worth seeing, (definitely a good date movie too).