DO OVER review
Now a look back a few years to a little flick featuring the breakout performance from current Taiwanese box-office it girl Sandrine Pinna ([i]Miao Miao[/i], [i]Yang Yang[/i]). Cheng Yu-Chieh's debut feature film is the story of one seemingly innocuous event and how it leads several different people to think about how their lives have ended up. Are you going to want to give it another chance or will [i]Do Over[/i] have you wishing you'd never watched it? Review after the break.
It's often fascinating watching a gifted director's work in advertising because, beyond the cheap gag or the catwalk product placement, commercials impose very few limits on them beyond broadcast standards (and arguably not even those, given the viral potential of 'banned' videos turning up on YouTube). Within that half or full minute you have near free rein to do whatever you feel you can convince the money men sells their product.
Still, whether [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiBX8MkFkd4]widescreen sentimentality[/url], [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bj6rzV8gSe8]shameless bait-and-switch[/url], [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhSYSwkziHI]retrograde visual self-indulgence[/url] or [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNVOl5_3_Zo]ham-fisted 'grrrl power',[/url] these are all meant to be taken in small doses. Push the advertising mentality to ninety minutes or more and what was originally enough to raise a smile turns into a major headache.
Cheng Yu-Chieh's debut feature [i]Do Over[/i] is obviously trying for the kind of pithy, iconic slogan advertisers like to kick around. Even the title suggests the Big Question the film wants to ask. It's a portmanteau movie of the kind Alejandro Iñárritu popularised with [i]Amores Perros[/i], [i]21 Grams[/i] and [i]Babel[/i], where a chance event connects several previously unconnected individuals.
After a film director orders his gopher to hold back traffic while the crew get a vital shot, it turns out the stalled cars were gangsters in pursuit of another vehicle up ahead. The story takes in the escapee; the mob boss he stole from; the pill-popping teenagers who score product off him; the director - the escapee sick of being tied down running fake passports for the gang; the mob boss caught up in family troubles; the teenagers desperate for a sense of identity; the director convinced the film is a pretentious dead end.
There's a wealth of thematic material here, and the opening is enough to have the viewer thinking this could be something special. The initial setpiece introducing the film-within-a-film is slow but engagingly distinctive (this establishes the central conceit of 'if only...') and the look is rich and cinematic with enough little camera flourishes and oblique angles to keep from becoming tedious.
Whatever his faults, Cheng is certainly an accomplished visual stylist. When the escaping gangster's story begins it may kick off with yet another weary night-time road trip seen through green and yellow filters but the cinematography, the brooding soundtrack and the restless, jittery editing elevate it quite some way above the competition. The voiceover is restrained enough it suggests something deeper than arthouse affectations and the overriding sense of brooding regret has the viewer ready for the point where all this is going to start interlocking into some thought-provoking philosophical meditation.
Only it never happens. The visual tricks keep coming - the over-the-shoulder camera view later in the gangster's story, some eye-catching use of CG, a shouted confession in the middle of a nightclub, toying with the audience's understanding of what is or is not real - and the score continues to pulse but the suspicion Cheng doesn't understand what any of this really means continues to grow. The teenagers' story and its repeated drugged-up meandering around questions of identity is Edward Yang lobotomised and repackaged for a three-minute attention span, the gangsters are Golden Age Hong Kong without the energy or the emotion and none of it ever feels as if it makes any [b]sense[/b].
On one level the film never ceases to entertain. There is real talent in here - the sequence where the teenagers escape a mysterious hospital clinic the morning after the night before is honestly riveting. Yet this is partly for all the wrong reasons. Where [b]is[/b] this place? Why the otherworldly horror atmospherics? Who brought them here? These things are never explained, and while on the one hand they suggest Cheng could make a stunning genre film with the right script, on the other they merely reinforce the impression [i]Do Over[/i] is heading rapidly off the rails.
By the time tragedy strikes, then shortly afterwards the director (the character) begins wringing his hands over how he's supposedly wasting his career, that impression becomes a certainty. The meta-narrative elements never feel remotely convincing and the sight of the director burning his film-within-a-film seems more like a lazy in-joke than anything else.
[i]Do Over[/i] never becomes a train wreck outright. The visual highs are frequently spectacular and anyone looking for style over content could well adore the film. The cast, including a younger Ke Jia-Yan and Sandrine Pinna ([url=https://screenanarchy.com/site/view/miao-miao-review/][i]Miao Miao[/i][/url]), struggle gamely with the script but ultimately [i]Do Over[/i] is simply too empty and confusing to leave any real impression beyond a missed opportunity.
It's not hard to see why it made a profit domestically - there's plenty here for the teenage demographic to obsess over - and Cheng Yu-Chieh bears looking out for. (His second film [i]Yang Yang[/i], also with Pinna, has so far picked up a much more favourable critical response.) But it's difficult to recommend [i]Do Over[/i] to anyone other than whoever likes the idea of a director spinning a succession of slick yet ultimately inconsequential images out to two solid hours. It wouldn't work for a commercial; it doesn't work here.
