Asian Film Review: Lover's Discourse (戀人絮語, 2011)

Last night I got a ticket to the HK premiere screening of Derek Tsang's directorial debut film (pics coming soon).  Its a co-direction actually, along with Jimmy Wan, titled "Lover's Discourse" (戀人絮語)... while that title either invokes thoughts of some excruciating art-house study of the human condition or an ironic p0rno movie, this movie is neither!

Although it isn't easy to classify this film or even to describe the plot.    It is about relationships obviously --   partially about the upside but also of course more about the downsides  In other words a realistic view you don't get in many movies... there's no phony story arcs here where the protagonist stands outside his girl's window playing Peter Gabriel on a boom-box and they live happily ever after... that is for sure.

As I had no real knowledge of the story going into it, at first I mistakenly thought it was a series of unrelated shorts,  but in fact Tsang manages to connect almost everything in the story in a realistic way,  which is a nice touch and helps get you into the story (I admit, at the beginning I was not so engaged and was afraid I wouldn't make it through the film w/o nodding off!)

The film features an ensemble cast that includes Eason Chan, William Chan, Kay Tse and AnD-ers Jacky Heung and Mavis Fan.  I may be biased (definitely am actually) but I thought they did the best of anyone in the film, with most of their scenes opposite each other.

I'll give the film a strong 7/10 for its unique storytelling approach and visually interesting presentation (there's some gimmicky editing tricks, filters, and overlays at point, some may find it distracting, I didn't mind it too much, but its definitely not subtle).  It also has some really interesting scenes,  including a four minute scene (w/ no, or almost no cuts) filmed in the middle of Causeway Bay on a busy evening... an impressive feature itself! :-P

Congrats to Derek, looking forward to more from him!