Aaron Kwok looking like a Chinese Forrest Gump.
Sometimes my role (its not a job) as critic is more thankless than usual. Sometimes you are faced with a no-win situation.
To be honest, I actually think its that way all the time.
But in the present situation, here’s the basic dilemma: If someone makes a movie about certain topics, the topics themselves can and do render criticism either moot or fraught with peril.
If someone made a drama (or a documentary) about professional foosball players, and the movie sucked, no one would care. Who cares about professional foosball players?
But if someone makes a movie about gay foosball players, and the movie sucks, anyone criticizing the film runs a very real risk of being branded a homophobe, a hate-monger and an asshole.
Some topics are above reproach, and films about them are often covered by the same umbrella.
That idea was on my mind when I went to see Love for Life/最愛. I had seen the trailer, and to be honest, things weren’t looking good.
One member of the Gang of Film (電影人幫) had even wondered aloud whether the film would put us (I include myself in the statement, thus allowing the use of the pronoun ‘us’ and preserving the person’s anonymity) in the unenviable (and indefensible) position of “rooting for AIDS.”
This, it turns out, was not the case, albeit not for (many of) the right reasons.
Let me ease into this review by way of some background, and a disclaimer/clarification.
Ignorance is bliss, something I learned in graduate school, and I try to be happy about movies. I always try to know nothing about a film before seeing it. So whatever I may share with you now is knowledge gained after viewing the film.
There were approximately 50 minutes cut from Love for Life/最愛. The director has said that if he knew that would happen, he’d have walked away from the project.
You see, the film apparently offended the Powers That Be, who objected to depictions of things that portray the Workers Paradise in less than flattering terms, like corruption.
And truth.
Best example: The word AIDS only appears in the English subtitles. It is called ‘hot fever’ in Love for Life/最愛.
That’s like saying ‘oppressive Communism,’ innit?
Apparently there is no AIDS in China.
We know this because the film starts with a title card assuring us not only that the film takes place in the early 90s (i.e. when China was still new to this whole Capitalism thing) and that it is TOTALLY FICTIONAL.
No AIDS in China.
Got it?
No, you don’t, because THERE IS NO AIDS IN CHINA.
The Party brooks neither insolence nor infection.
They flailed away with the hammer and sickle, removing all the (politically) offending bits.
They left some cinematically offending bits, but more on that later.
What this means is that Love for Life/最愛 opens in the second act, but with no knowledge/synopsis/idea of what has happened before.
Much of what you see in the online trailers is not in the film. It takes place in the (excised) first act.
You meet people that the film expects you to know by now, but you don’t.
Because you can’t.
You just met them.
Surviving scenes, and even shots, show gross evidence of tampering, such that the transitions are often blunt, jagged, and confusing.
In other words, the film is hamstrung from the opening. It’s like making a mirror from broken pieces of a mirror. You can kind of fit them together, and it does do the basic mirroring function, but it requires a lot of extra effort and you can’t ever really concentrate on the image because of the broken parts.
But that may work in Love for Life/最愛‘s favor. Because frankly, while there may be some good things on the cutting room floor, they should have had some company. There are more than a few things that remained in **Love for Life/最愛‘ that would be better off lost.**
The film is competently shot, and looks nice. The editing gets a pass simply because the enforced changes render critique of editing pointless. The acting is passable and occasionally good.
That leaves us the scrīptwriter and the director, both of whom are named Gu Changwei.
The film’s attempts at pathos are often cringe-inducing. The worst instance, and best example, is a scene where Zhang Ziyi reads her marriage certificate aloud. It is touching, well-acted, and very emotional.
Unfortunately, she then proceeds to re-read it several times, wringing all the emotion out of it and placing you firmly in the seat marked Will This Nightmare Never End?It is as if the director wants to squeeze every last drop of pity he can out of the situation, and he does. By the time it ends, all your pity is indeed gone.
Speaking of pity, Aaron Kwok indulges in what any Westerner would call Attempted Date Rape of Zhang Ziyi at one point, but the film apparently feels this is just an accurate depiction of the extent of his emotions.
Besides, she has AIDS, so you know she wants it. They all do.
The film’s matter-of-fact depictions offer some rather unsettling and unflattering images of modern day China and its citizens. That these scenes are played for laughs, or offered simply as exposition, often does more harm than anything that the apparatchiks may have excised.
Only slightly less nauseating than the proletarian realities are the occasional attempts at humor, which reek of anti-bourgeois earthiness and working-class verite.
I’m a lover of low brow humor, but no AIDS movie ever made needs undercranked donkey chase scenes.
No, that’s not a euphemism. Though I can see why you’d think so.
Besides, this isn’t really an AIDS movie. It’s about people with AIDS- I mean ‘hot fever’ – but the disease really has no bearing on the film. It could have been cancer, or any other terminal disease .
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So here we are, just where I didn’t want to be: I’m slagging off a movie about AIDS. But, as I hope I have made clear, it’s not really an AIDS movie, and its really not a good movie. It could have been, and maybe with the magic of a Director’s Cut DVD, it could be. But as it is, this film doesn’t really work.
It didn’t have me rooting for AIDS, but only because AIDS isn’t ever really in the movie. It did, however, have me thinking that the Big Red Scalpel of Harmony actually hadn’t cut enough.
Frightening.
If we don't support the movies that deserve it, we get the movies that we deserve.