Reviews

Director P. S. Cheang is certainly one of the best new talents in Hong Kong!

In "Love Battlefield" (Ai zuozhan), Cheang skillfully adapted the requirement of the mainland China market and the strength of Hong Kong movies and turned the "Love Battlefield" into a wonderful crossover romantic story and thriller.

In the first half an hour, Yui (Eason Chan) and Ching (Niki Chow) had showed us just another ordinary lover relationship of city kidults. They love, they fight and they hate because of minor things.

Then, their car was stolen by robbers and Yui was kidnapped. That put their life upside down.

The robber couple Wah (Wang zhiwen) and his wife (Qin hailu) is a sharp contrast to the city couple. They have to struggle to survive. After this incident, Yui and Ching learned what to be treasured.

P.S. Cheang's old films are all ghost stories. In his films, the ghosts are always irrational and innocent people suffers. This violates the tradition of Hong Kong ghosts stories, which used to offer a 'reason' for the thing. (Let's compare it with "The Eye" & "Three") In "Love Battlefield", those robbers just behaved like P.S. Cheang's old ghosts.

For the people who love thrillers genre or romance genre, they might find it isn't their cup of tea. But for people who are looking for something new. It certainly the movie that had to see. It brings out the best of the 2 genres.

Niki Chow's performance has a breakthrough! She gave her best to the audience. Under the direction of Cheang, she is not a doll anymore, but someone that can act. Eason Chan's performance is beyond his average too. Graduated from mainland art schools, mainland Chinese actors Wang Zhiwen and Qin hailu's acting is something different from Hong Kong's style.

And last but not the least, the writing credit is a mistake. Joe Ma didn't write this story. He's the producer, and it's K. Y. Szeto who wrote this wonderful story.

It's nostalgia! With all the "streetscape" of the "good old Hong Kong". If you loved HK, you'll love this film. Besides, the film is poetic and much more like an art film than any traditional animated movies, such as Disney's. And I'm very glad that we finally have an animated movie that is unique.

The story is about "reality bites". And the family of McDull showed 3 kinds of attitude towards life, i.e. searching for the past (identity/dream/ideals), future (to be practical/ materialism), and to be stayed in the present. Technically, that's more room to improve, and the story-telling is fragmented. However, it was cleverly use the voice over to link the several parts of the story.

I cannot accept that this is a dull film. Instead, I found it is an excellent one, even better than Samira Makhmalbaf's "At Five in the Afternoon" and Peter Mullen's "Madeleine Sisters". The filmmaker express the evil of fundamentalism only in a very subtle manner, but when the story developed, the audience would follow the executioner, who was a follower in the film, to question the fundamentalism. And the 12 minutes long take in the opening is wonderful too!