Johnnie To's LOVING YOU Review
Johnnie To's solution to marital troubles? Get shot in the head! I kid, I kid. But only sort of. A genre mashing pot boiler of the highest order that is eminently watchable despite its obvious flaws Loving You is yet another example of an under seen contemporary film returning to the light of day thanks to the ongoing restoration and re-release of the Shaw Brothers catalog in Hong Kong. While all the Shaw fans have been salivating over the new releases of the classic seventies kung fu library a host of other, more recent titles - including some featuring the likes of Stephen Chow and Corey Yuen - have also been freed from the vaults and given the chance to find a new audience.
Lau Ching-Wan stars as Liu, a remarkably unlikeable police officer at the head of an anti-drug unit. He's arrogant, cold, demanding and spends days on end away from home and his young bride. When a drug bust goes horribly wrong, leaving one of his subordinates and an informant dead while the criminals escape clean, Liu goes on a drunken bender blowing off a family dinner, opting instead to get drunk in a local bar and screw some random woman in the back alley. Now, that's romance for you. While his wife may not be aware of Liu's infidelity she sure as hell is aware that she's married to an unfeeling bastard and, consequently, has been having an affair of her own, one that has left her pregnant and planning to leave him - the news she had planned to break at the aforementioned family meal. You wouldn't think that the day she finally does break the news to Liu could get any worse afterwards, but get worse it does when another attempted bar pick-up turns out to be a setup and he's shot in the head by the drug boss he's been pursuing. Cue the melodrama.
Liu survives, the bullet passing through his sinuses and tongue - leaving his senses of smell and taste impaired - while doing minimal damage to critical brain function. Lucky break or no, though, the man's still laid up in hospital for a long, long time and his estranged wife, plagued by her own guilt at leaving, feels compelled to tend to him there. Liu slowly begins to reevaluate his life and make a change, their relationship slowly begins to grow and they seem on the path to reconciliation. And then, of course, the drug king breaks out of jail ...
No mistake about it, Loving You is not the cream of the Johnnie To crop. Clocking in under eighty minutes the short run time doesn't even begin to allow enough time for any serious character development and there are some serious problems in the way some situations are handled. The treatment of the wife's character, for instance, will send any self respecting feminist into fits of rage. What it does have going for it, however, is the undeniable screen charisma of star Lau Ching-Wan and a go-for-broke attitude towards its shameless manipulation of the audience that sees it go from Liu stuffing great mounds of food into his mouth when he realizes something is wrong with his sense of taste, to the sentimentality of his would-be reconciliation, to a climax that sees him rescuing his wife - bound to a rolling office chair while having labor contractions, the child of her lover deciding a shoot out would be a good time to arrive - from the shotgun toting villain while himself staving off seizures triggered by leaking brain fluid. Sure, the characters may not be at all realistic or fleshed out, but golly if this isn't the sort of wild action / melodrama hybrid that could be produced nowhere else but Hong Kong and it's a fine example of the type.
This new DVD, as has been the case with all of the Shaw re-issues, is fairly basic but solid. The transfer is crisp and clean and presented in the proper ratio with reasonably good English subtitles included. Special features are limited to trailers, a stills gallery and production notes.
