From writer/director Ho-Cheung Pang comes Love in the Buff, the latest romantic comedy from China to hit US theaters and, unbeknownst to me, the sequel to the hit film Love in a Puff.
The film is about Cherie (Miriam Young) and Jimmy (Shawn Yue), a couple living together in Hong Kong who have hit a rough patch and are stuck going through the motions. Jimmy is a man who has yet to mature, whose job controls his life and is not emotionally invested to the relationship ultimately forcing Cherie to leave him. After unsuccessfully trying to win her back, Jimmy transfers to a new job in Beijing where he hopes to start anew and ends up meeting a beautiful flight attendant named Youyou (Mini Yang).
As time passes, Cherie’s company begins to downsize and have closed their offices in Hong Kong, she is then asked to transfer to Beijing to be a store manager and one day, on her way to lunch, she has a chance run-in with Jimmy. With the two leading two separate lives and both dating different people, the thought of each other close by is enough for Jimmy to ask her to have a friendly dinner. This was enough to light a new spark in the relationship and though Cherie is still trying to date other people, she admits that she still loves Jimmy. The two eventually go behind their partners’ backs, have sex and soon problems arise again. They both have their own issues to overcome and each keep trying to find a way to make it work despite the plethora of failed attempts.
I must say I was quite shocked by the quality of this film. What struck me by surprise was how honest it was about relationships and love in general. Many of the Chinese romantic comedies that I’ve seen are very bubbly and all follow the same typical story arc: Boy meets girl: boy hurts girl: boy redeems himself and says he’ll change. While this film has elements of that basic structure in it, a majority of the story is about separation, love sickness and how the heart, despite the better judgment of the brain, is such an influential factor and won’t allow people to just let go of someone when they are close by. It’s quite possible that I liked this film a lot because I haven’t seen the original which is actually a good thing if you ask me.
Even if the film isn’t laugh out loud funny, it has enough chuckles in it to make it worthwhile but I think the movie focuses more on the drama of love then on getting the audience to laugh. What I also really admired about Ho-Cheung Pang ‘s script was the fact that the characters were just regular people who spoke like regular people. They weren’t overly witty or going over the top to try and impress people, they lived and acted within the realm of a normalcy and not within the Hollywood glamour realm that we all are familiar with.
The only real downside to the film is that the funniest scene happens approximately two minutes into the feature. Cherie is telling a story about a friend who seems to be destined for loneliness. Every time her friend gets a boyfriend he ends up dying in some freak accident leaving her alone again. The first death of the story is hilarious and totally unexpected. I didn’t know anything about the film before I watched it and was hoping the story was going to be about Cherie’s friend trying to find a guy that would date her and not die on her too. While that would have been really funny, my plot assumption wrong and this was all about Cherie and Jimmy’s relationship struggles.
While it could be quite possible that I liked this film a lot because I didn’t see the original, if one observes it as a standalone film like I did, you’ll be able to appreciate the humor, honesty and respect it has for love and real life relationships.
Rating: A solid romantic Chinese export that succeeds where Hollywood constantly fails (6.5/10)
Love in the Buff is now playing in select theaters across the country
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