Starring: Jiang Wenli, Karen Mok Man-wai, Tan Jianci, Eric Tsang Chi-wai Director: Zhang Yibai Category: IIB (Putonghua)
The bleak metropolis of Chongqing is an apt backdrop for the travails facing a mother and son and their unlikely flatmate in director-writer Zhang Yibai's offbeat drama. The steep hills, turbulent river, ramshackle buildings, and, most telling of all, an unfinished bridge not quite spanning the Yangtze, serve as understated metaphors for the transitions that the principal players struggle with.
For doctor and part-time veterinarian Fanli (Jiang Wenli), that means coming to terms with the fatal plunge of her taxi driver husband Wu Tao (Eric Tsang) and the home care (in Fanli's cramped apartment) of his crippled passenger, Cantonese bar girl Su Dan (Karen Mok). For Fanli's teenage son, Xiaochuan (Tan Jianci), the grieving process is complicated by his coming of age and the presence of the mysterious woman, whose relationship with his dad may have been more than just that of fare-paying stranger. Su Dan, meanwhile, copes with the anxiety of whether her shattered leg will ever heal, and the odd twist of fate that has made the free-spirited good-time girl dependent on the wife and son of the man whose actions nearly ended her life.
Zhang, who wrote the script with Zhao Tianyu, allows the intricacies of the interpersonal relationships to unfold with nuance and fluidity, while integrating Chongqing's distinctive cityscape into the proceedings. Zhang is adept at portraying teenage angst and sexual awakening, with Tan making an impressive debut as an angry but relatively unrebellious adolescent. Jiang (far left with Mok) delivers a perceptive and restrained performance that is refreshingly unsentimental. Mok displays a special ability to lend her character's tawdry allure a down-to-earth core of humanity, whether playing the petulant patient, the bitchy vamp, or simply a woman scared by the narrowed options her future holds.
Deserving more screen time is a sketchily developed subplot featuring Eason Chan Yik-shun as a dog owner who becomes infatuated with his helpless vet.
The director's attempts at humorous symbolism via the husband's portrait bearing witness from the living room wall, his facial expression changing according to the plot, has the consequence of highlighting the story's artifice. An unanticipated side effect is that, coming so soon after the Mid-Autumn Festival, the sight of Tsang's close-up triggers thoughts of moon cakes rather than the Wu clan's woes.