Perhaps Love Review
All the signs leading up to its release were that Peter Chan's Perhaps Love would be a glorious visual spectacle. The lushly designed musical was shot by acclaimed cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Peter Pau and the possibilities of what these men could do when turned loose on the most cinematic of genres set the knees a tremblin'. The early trailers were gorgeous and the Oscar submission seemed to confirm it. Perhaps Love was something special. Well, on the visual level it is. Perhaps Love is one of those rare films so visually impressive that you cut literally take it apart frame by frame and not find a single weak image. The images on screen are simply stunning. Unfortunately Perhaps Love is littered with so many other flaws that, pretty pictures or not, the film verges on unwatchable.
A film within a film Perhaps Love stars veteran actor Jacky Cheung as an acclaimed mainland Chinese auteur deep in the throes of a crisis of self confidence. He is prepping his first mainstream film, a musical revolving around circus performers, and it is safe to say that in the man found huddled deep within the hood of his winter parka in his first appearance on screen. His leading lady, played by Zhou Xun, is an ice cold opportunist, a frigid woman who refuses to discuss any aspect of her past with anyone, much less the public, and who was made into a major Chinese star by Cheung's director character. Assuming it was intentional the relationship between these two seems to be taking a swipe at Zhang Yimou's relationships with leading actresses Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi, and is the film's one moment of cleverness. Takeshi Kaneshiro is cast as the film's leading man, a major star brought in from Hong Kong, a man caught in a haze of depression and sleeping pills. Kaneshiro has a secret history with Zhou, and also sports an alarming tendency to take late night swims decked out in his dressing gown.
So where does the film stumble? If I were a betting man I'd have put down early money on the music, but no. Cheung and Kaneshiro both acquit themselves well and while the song and dance numbers would be better described as workmanlike than inspired they're certainly not painful.
Major flaw number one comes with the structure. You have a sung prologue riffing on the nature of memory, then move in to the film within a film structure at which point you are bombarded with more flashbacks than you can shake a stick at. The ‘real world' characters zip back and forth from past to present and just when you think you might be safe in the ‘film world' sections, those characters start to do so as well. Back story is all well and good but when you can't go five minutes without leaping into another time period it simply wreaks havoc with the film's momentum. Every time it feels like it's finally starting to go somewhere, bam! Another flashback, you're somewhere else entirely, and by the time you get back the energy is gone. The structural flaws also point to another, deeper issue that will be addressed later …
Major flaw number two: Chan has constructed a love triangle in which a) none of the characters seem to love much of anything, much less each other and b) none of them are in the slightest loveable. There is no point here at which you would want to identify with or emotionally invest in any of the three leads. Major, major problem. Zhou Xun is simply an emotional vacuum. A cold, calculating manipulator who has a long history of using people to her advantage and tossing them away. Jacky Cheung, the supposed sensitive auteur deals with his angst with all the complexity of a fifteen year old, muttering about whether people will still care about him “if the film sucks”. Kaneshiro, who comes off the best of the trio, mostly just glowers and pops pills (when not swimming fully clothed late at night) but at least he glowers well.
The most significant flaw however, and the one hinted at above, is that Chan has crafted a film here with a story and emotional arc that simply doesn't suit the genre. Musicals should be big, expansive things. Hell, even Von Trier understood that the song and dance numbers in Dancer in the Dark needed to have some pop and that's a film that ended with an execution! Musicals are about expression on a grand, preferably ludicrously grand, scale and mostly these people just want to sit around and sulk. The content just doesn't suit the form and Chan himself almost seems to be apologizing for that by couching the musical numbers as nothing more than a part of the film his characters are working on. If you're going to make a musical, for god's sake don't stop to explain it. We all know that it's kind of silly for these people to be breaking out into song. If we didn't want that silliness we wouldn't be here. If you're going to make a musical you have to go for it, you have to go big, or it all just falls apart. Ultimately the film's greatest sin is that in a genre that absolutely demands emotion on a broad scale Perhaps Love makes everyone hold everything in.
For those who do want to take a look at the film the just released Hong Kong DVD is a good one. The extra features are unfortunately left unsubtitled but the film gets a fantastic transfer and a high definition DTS audio track. It looks and sounds great and the English subs on the feature are solid. And despite the negativity on the film it really does bear repeating that the visuals are spectacular. It's just too bad that instead of Love it gave me Boredom.
