Comrades, A Love Story starts off feeling like a romantic comedy. A man from rural China arrives in Hong Kong one evening on the train. He’s bewildered by the size of the city and the number of people in it. He manages to find his way to his aunt’s house which, it turns out, is a brothel. There’s a hooker there named Cabbage (yes Cabbage). Anyways, his aunt gives him a room to stay in. There’s just enough space for him to lay down amongst the boxes and other clutter. He doesn’t let it dampen his spirits though. In fact, as we find out through the letters he sends back home to his girlfriend, he’s as happy as a clam.
It takes a trip to McDonald's for XiaoJun to learn that you can’t get very far in Hong Kong without Cantonese. Luckily the server, a cute girl (Maggie Chung), speaks Mandarin and helps him out. Later on she suggests to him that English lessons would be a good idea if he wants to find work. She works part-time at a school and offers to set him up with some classes. Once it’s done she says “have a nice life” and leaves him to fend for himself.
They continue to bump into each other at the school over the next couple weeks. The encounters usually involve XaioJun demonstrating his ignorance in technology, language or manners. He drops his jaw when he learns she has a pager, as if it were tantamount to possessing a holy relic. He doubles her home on his bike one day and innocently comments, “you’re heavier than my girlfriend”. The general idea is that he’s a dope, but she puts up with him. They aren’t friends yet, just friendly acquaintances.
XiaoJun’s English lessons consist of him watching old westerns and slapstick comedies and repeating phrases like “go to hell” and “jump you son of a bitch”. The teacher is an alcoholic who sits at the back of the class taking swigs from his hip flask. When XiaoJun isn’t taking English lessons he’s working as a delivery-man. He delivers chickens on his country-bumpkin bicycle.
Maggie Chung, the cute girl from McDonald’s and the part-time school janitor, also works a whole host of other jobs. She sells flower arrangements and ponrographic videos, and she hires XiaoJun to deliver them. She a money-minded individual if ever there was one. She even says “I could have friends if I wanted, but I want money more”. In any case, they both end up spending quite a bit of time together. Whether she thinks they are friends or not, XaioJun does.
At this point in the movie things take a welcome turn and become more serious. The whole goofy guy, workaholic girl angle, which was an effective but tedious character building period of the film, is replaced with actual compelling drama. One rainy night, after failing to sell anything at the market together, XaioJun and Qiao go back to his place for a bite. They talk about where they came from. Qiao gets defensive when XaioJun says they are from a similar area. She resents her heritage and is proud of earning her place in the big city. Still, she doesn’t close herself off to XaioJun. Predictably, but naturally, things get more intimate, and by intimate I mean we see XaioJun take his sweater off and the film fades to black. It’s a very well-played scene. Maggie Chun, the little looks she gives, her movements... It kind of dawned on me just how good of an actress she is.
The next morning we see XiaoJun out on the street using a payphone and making a very awkward call to his girlfriend back home thanking her for the gifts she sent for New Years. She thanks him for the all the letters. He lies and says “I love you”. Time passes, he continues to write to her, trying, and failing, to tell her that he’s fallen in love with someone else. And on it goes, in and out of cliche territory. The story spans many years and follows our two characters through thick and thin (and believe me, things do get pretty thin). The film didn’t blow me away with originality or surprises, but it was well told. Conventional sure, but compelling too. Strong performances and a nice soundtrack don’t hurt either. You could call it paint-by-numbers and I wouldn’t argue with you, but hey, at sometimes you’ve gotta do what gets the job done.
The film worked best for me when the tone was serious. It goes to some dark places, and I was right there with it. There are attempts at comic relief, which usually I would welcome, but unfortunately they come in the form of cartoonish characters who just didn’t make me laugh. Only a minor setback. On the whole I enjoyed this film.
Unlike Comrades, I don't have a lot to say about this one. It's not plot heavy, but does enough to feel like it's going somewhere. It sets up the characters early, then jumps ahead 15 years and lets things play out as they may. A rural family consisting of a Father, his wife, his daughter, his nephew and his mother. They react to a few minor and one major incident, and then the film is over. The satisfaction comes in understanding their relationships and their situation more than what ends up happening. Even so, it's stretched pretty thin imo.
Not a fan.
Verdict:
Comrades, Almost a Love Story moves on.