All About Love

Year:2005
Director:Daniel Yu Wai-Kwok
Cast:Andy Lau Tak-Wah, Charlie Young Choi-Nei, Charlene Choi Cheuk-Yin, Hui Siu-Hung, Sasha Hou Sa-Sa, Lam Suet, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Joe Cheung Tung-Cho
Description:
Andy
Lau does double duty in the attractive, but ultimately
laughable romantic drama All About Love. Lau
is Ko, a workaholic doctor whose young wife is constantly waiting for his time and attention.
One day she drives to the hospital to pick up her
husband for a long-awaited dinner, only to get denied
when something else comes up. The lesson here is that
she shouldn't have even driven to the hospital because
once again her husband was busy. The other lesson
is she should have looked both ways before pulling
out of the parking lot, because she gets into a massive
slow-mo car accident that seals her fate right quick.
Ko's wife dies, and he's left a broken shell of a
man. That's right: one of the Twins dies. And this
is only ten minutes into the picture.
Fear not, fans of Charlene
Choi: the toothy Twin returns for enough flashbacks
to fill three other films. After losing his wife in
the tragic accident, Ko becomes a withdrawn shell
of a man, and goes about his daily life with an emotionless,
robotic stiffness that recalls most of Leon Lai's
performances. However, while on ambulance duty, Ko
meets Sam , an emotionally-wounded
woman who just so happened to have a heart transplant.
Ko realizes the truth soon: Sam bears his wife's heart
within her fragile frame, and the massive coincidence
is enough to shock him back into some semblance of
life. Ko reasons that he was never able to spend enough
time with his wife while alive, so now he wants to
spend as much time as he can with her sole remaining
body part: her heart. That her heart happens to be
in another woman is apparently not much of obstacle
for Ko, nor is it really supposed to be a morbid turnoff
for the audience. After all, director Dennis Yu reveals
everything with such reverent, slow-dissolve romantic
style that Ko's journey is supposed to be heartbreaking
and not really disturbing. An alternate title for
this film: Man Stalks Wife's Heart.
However, Ko's heart-chasing
ways are excusable thanks to massive coincidence number
two: Ko is the virtual twin of Sam's husband Derek.
Sam is emotionally hurt due to a painful separation
from Derek, and the emotional turmoil seems to be
contributing to her body's rejection of the transplanted
heart. Ko learns all this thanks to contrived romantic
drama circumstances. First, there's a bizarre online
chat with Sam's heart surgeon , plus a convenient search through Sam's home.
Sam leaves her keys at the hospital, and Ko is supposed
to return them to her, but instead of doing so, he
secretly enters her home Chungking Express-style.
The breaking-and-entering allows him to read her diary,
check out pictures of Sam and Derek, and reminisce
about his dead wife. The flashbacks are full of endearing
daily minutiae that hammer home three things: A) Ko
didn't spend enough time with his wife, B) his wife
was cuter than a stuffed animal, and C) the two really
loved one another. The result of this emotional onslaught
is a strengthening of Ko's resolve: he will spend
even more time with his wife's heart by ensuring that
it lives on in Sam's body. But how will Ko, a complete
stranger who just so happens to look like her estranged
husband, heal her emotional wounds?
If film quality were
measured by sheer chutzpah, All About Love
would be one of the greatest romances ever made. The
film is not only filled with contrivances, manufactured
circumstances, and loaded emotions, but is told with
such heavy-handed reverence that it becomes either
incredibly touching or totally laughable. The key
here is suspension of disbelief, a factor the film
nearly earns thanks to some decent acting and deliberate,
show-not-tell storytelling. Andy Lau is effective
in his two roles, Charlie Young brings affecting emotions
to Sam, and Charlene Choi infuses her scenes with
as much adorable chipmunk cheer as she can muster.
All About Love seems dramatically sound thanks
to its loaded, could-be-a-Korean-tearjerker plotline
and solid production values. The people behind All
About Love certainly worked hard to make this
a quality motion picture.
However, they might
have tried too hard. All About Love already
taxes the credibility meter with its heart transplant
storyline, but the Andy Lau doppelganger factor completely
trashes any believability the film possesses. All
About Love goes for cleverness with a couple of
large twists meant to add an extra layer of drama
to the already heavily-dramatic story. Unfortunately,
the film achieves cleverness at too high a cost, and
asks us to accept stuff that simply is not believable.
Actually explaining what we're talking about risks
major spoiler territory, so we'll just say this: if
we're to accept what the film presents then A) the
characters are clueless or delusional, and B) we,
the audience, are so taken in by pretty people and
convenient pathos that we're willing to accept something
that's clearly a load of hogwash. Shouldn't we ask
our romantic dramas to at least be credible?
Granted, the film does
provide some final exposition to clear up some nagging
believability issues. But it may not be enough. Besides
simple credibility issues, All About Love features
cheesy romantic flourishes
and some far too obvious product placement. While
mourning the loss of his wife, Ko makes sure to chug
some bottles of the green tea Andy Lau routinely plugs;
when a character sheds a tear in slow motion, it drops
with heavy seriousness onto a CYMA watch, currently
worn by Andy Lau on billboards in every MTR station
in Hong Kong. Knocking the film for its product placement
may seem too harsh, and international audiences will
likely not realize that All About Love is really
a 100-minute romance/tragedy/commercial. Still, the
egregious cheekiness of Andy Lau and company is simply
too much to ignore. Here's the rundown: Andy Lau products
are everywhere in the film, he just released an album
also called All About Love, and there are even
two Andy Laus in the movie! Had they featured a scene
with the two Laus sharing a beer, it would have been
the icing on the cake. It's all right for a film to
be solidly commercial, and had the filmmakers toned
down the excess, All About Love could have
been such a film. But in pushing too much cleverness,
contrivance, and commercialism, All About Love
is ultimately only crass.