Review | Film review: Lost and Love - Andy Lau plays a driven father
Fourteen years after his two-year-old son was abducted, Anhui farmer Lei Zekuan (Andy Lau Tak-wah) is still doggedly searching the length and breadth of China for him.
Starring: Andy Lau Tak-wah, Jing Boran
Director: Peng Sanyuan
Category: I (Putonghua)
Fourteen years after his two-year-old son was abducted, Anhui farmer Lei Zekuan (Andy Lau Tak-wah) is still doggedly searching the length and breadth of China for him.
Riding an old motorcycle to which he's attached large flags bearing his son's face and some information about him, the weather-beaten father refuses to give up on the search because, as he tells a sympathetic stranger, "Only when I'm on the road can I feel like I can face my conscience".
It's easy to feel for this character especially since the movie is reportedly based on a true story — there are tens of thousands of child abduction and trafficking cases on the mainland annually.
Where Lei's story stands out from that of other traumatised parents such as the distraught mother (Ni Jingjang) seen in the opening scenes, and also those in another film about child abduction, Peter Chan Ho-sun's is the duration of his search, even though the chance of success diminishes with every passing day.
However admirable we regard the protagonist's search, the film soon becomes boring and not even having a genuine Hong Kong superstar playing the role of the stoic, unglamorous father does much to enliven it. (Tony Leung Ka-fai and Sandra Ng Kwan-yu also feature in this drama, but their parts are too small to lift the action significantly — apart from upping this otherwise modest movie's celebrity quotient.)
Perhaps recognising this, writer-director Peng introduces a second, livelier main character: a young motorcycle repairman (Jing Boran) who fixes Lei's bike following an accident in the Wuyi mountains.
It turns out that the repairman, Zeng, was abducted from his home at the age of four and he asks the older man to help him track down his own biological parents.
There are scenes involving the two that take on a lighter tone and almost feel out of place in what is otherwise a movie intent on focusing attention on the lasting psychological scars of the victims of child abduction — parents as well as children.
And although Zeng's is the secondary story, it's actually the one that supplies the film's most cathartic and potentially most redemptive, moments.
