SOMEBODY TO LOVE review
Zhou Nan's Somebody to Love is, well, nice. That's not meant as a pejorative - 'nice' as a synonym for 'okay, but forgettable'. It's just relentlessly, perkily upbeat, a mainstream rom-com that (for all it's obviously trying to sell tickets) genuinely seems to want everyone to be happy. And yet what makes it more than just a long string of empty platitudes isn't so much a game cast or amusing plot, but - against all expectations - the explicit admission that sometimes things just don't work out, and all you can do is pick yourself up and move on.
The disparate cast don't buck any trends. The lead girl, Jenny (Li Feier) is the pretty, optimistic young reporter demoted from investigative pieces to overseeing a dating show sliding into oblivion. The boss, Sheng Rong (Liu Weiwei, In Love We Trust) is more interested in wrapping up her painful divorce than dragging the staff through their final episode, but under Jenny's prompting gives her the go-ahead to handle the celebrity Valentine's Day lineup - on the condition if she can't handle it, she's fired.
Unwittingly Sheng Rong assigns Jenny the handsome business mogul Lu Jiasen (Wang Bo Chieh, Bodyguards and Assassins) as one of her targets, not knowing Jenny's last assignment was a takedown of Lu's company he's still cleaning up. Another of the show's personnel is also nursing a guilty secret - Jian Chen (Wang Sen), one of the directors, is dating pretty idol Shasha (Cao Yuan) and persuades her she should appear on the show to boost her profile, despite her wanting him to take their romance public. And musician Gao Fan (Dennis Oh, Sweet Spy) has his agent Gu Jia (Annie Wu, My Belle Boss) insisting he needs the boost to his career, but he's more concerned at how she claims his refusal to grow up means they'll never be a couple again.
All of which seems like the typical convoluted melodrama beloved of mass-market romantic comedies, and admittedly it's not as if any of this throws up any surprises. Somebody to Love takes place in that warm, pastel-coloured fantasy world common to so many movies where no-one has to worry about anything - failing to land a husband means disappointing your parents rather than having to struggle through life by yourself - and nothing ever happens to really rock the boat.
But where other recent mainland rom-coms like You Deserve to be Single had some good ideas but drowned them under an avalanche of product placement, airbrushed smiles and general vacuous monologuing, Somebody to Love is, well, nice. It's surprising how much something so simple counts for. The protagonists are fairly obvious types, and examples to aspire to - pretty, monied, successful - but they still feel just about nuanced and convincingly flawed and generally, honestly decent enough they feel like actual people.
When Lu entertains Jenny's clumsy efforts to convince him to join the show anyone who's seen more than a handful of films like Somebody to Love will know exactly where it's going, but their rapport engenders enough gentle back-and-forth it's worth watching, for all the generic music video gloss Zhou Nan throws on. When Gao Fan sulks at Gu Jia it's an obvious excuse for Dennis Oh to stand around with his shirt off, but there's an undercurrent of real empathy for this manchild who's slowly realising he wants something he's actually going to have to work for.
Perhaps the most affecting plot thread is Jian Chen and Shasha's. Cultural differences mean their big dilemma seems a bit odd from a Western perspective - it takes something more on the level of a secret porn career to bring down an It Girl over here, and sometimes not even that - and Cao Yuan's performance skirts perilously close to infantile, all doe eyes, pouting and sudden hysterics. But again, there's a surprising feeling of honesty about it, a real connection between the two where so many other rom-coms trade on sassy one-liners and smarm. Shasha seems genuinely, palpably heartbroken the guy she loves doesn't want her to tell anyone, enough that it cuts through any amount of clichés Zhou Nan breaks out.
On that note, to dial back the enthusiasm a notch, Somebody to Love is definitely stuck firmly in good, rather than great. It lacks the wit and effortless charm of something like Alexi Tan's Colour Me Love, or the elegance and pathos of any of Zhang Yibai's movies. Its cast do turn out to be surprisingly likeable, yes, but they're still not much for hidden depths, and the production values are workmanlike at best. But that eagerness to please carries the film a long way, next to so many others where you can practically hear the box office transactions going through.
It's definitely not going to convince everyone. The ending is so unrepentantly chipper that any committed cynics who made it that far would probably end up running out of the room in terror. In context, though, it actually strikes you as fairly convincing. Somebody to Love is an effervescent romantic trifle with absolutely zero pretensions to lasting greatness, true, but at the same time it's not using its running time to shill cars, expensive watches or place its stars up on a pedestal. Canny PR or not, it really does feel like it cares - and for that, it deserves a recommendation.
