Perhaps Love / 如果愛

 6/10

Movie:

Perhaps Love (2006)

END MOODS/CURRENTS

| Entry | I decided to hunt this movie down after meeting Zhou Xun for the 2nd time last week at the HKFA (seeing her for the 3rd time actually if you include her wisking by me at the Banquet premiere).

This is the film she won the Best actress awards at last year's HKFA for. Its a musical about a love triangle between her, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Jacky Cheung who play two actors and an actor/director, working together on a movie.... a movie about a love triangle between their three characters as a matter of fact (oh, how ironic!)

I don't want to give too much away, but let me at least warn you that the first 20-30 minutes are extremely confusing... it'll take a while to figure out what is really going on. The film jumps back and forth between time quite a lot (shedding light on the character's histories as they go along), so it can get a bit confusing. Also they throw in this korean actor who's character shows up randomly but makes no little sense... i found it best to just ignore him. :-P

I think its hard to appreciate a musical in another language too...its easy to enjoy the tune (although i only found one or two of the songs really catchy musically), but understanding the meaning and how it relates to the story via subtitles is a lot harder. I think that may be a big impediment for people really liking this movie. Zhou Xun does a good job and of course Jacky is Jacky... although it sounds like he's channeling the Phantom of the Opera for most of his scenes. :-P

Filming wise it was very nicely done, lots of scenes of wintery Beijing were done nicely. The weirdo circus stuff seemed like it was trying to be moulon Rouge a little too hard, but that's not the end of the world... But the director uses the thing well...

All that said its hard for me to give this one a fresh... I was really tempted to give it a 5, but since Zhou Xun does a really good job in it, I'll push it up to 6. :-P