“LOST AND LOVE” (2015) 失孤 Movie Review. Lilting moments of a lonesome 15 year journey will tug at your heartstrings.

“LOST AND LOVE” (2015) 失孤 Movie Review. 

A RUSTIC SETTING IN CHINA, where this Heartbreaking and Compelling Film focusing on GRIEF and its AFTERMATH begins. Stay braced, folks!

FATHER and long-lost SON REUNION?

“WELL, IT’S TIME TO DUMP YOUR OLD MOTORBIKE! It’s beyond redemption!”

“CAN HE BE MY LONG-LOST SON?”

A surpossedly FATHER’S genuine CONCERN

 “LOST AND LOVE” (2015) 失孤 Movie Review.

This is Peng Sanyuan’s directorial debut and she chooses a theme that tackles the dreaded subject of child-abductions in China.

With an excellent script and also, largely, to a competent cast, she succeeds in demonstrating via this film, the pains and desperation Chinese families have to go through when their children fall into the wrong hands of strangers.

She bagged Andy Lau to play the lead man of a staunch father who never gives up on hope that his son is still alive, even when the odds clearly deem it could be a futile search, after all the boy was abducted fourteen years ago when he was barely two years old.

Andy Lau is in his element in his most grungy role ever – but the film’s winning streaks are Mark Lee Ping-bin‘s awesome widescope cinematography that captures the mainland China’s magnificant, sprawling landscapes.

Teenage star Jing Boran‘s impressive performance as a youngster searching for his biological parents should earn him a cry or two.

We observe the arguments between foster father (Andy Lau) and himself as the two guys’ lives converge in powerful interlinked narratives of love and loss, history and its echoes, and of the unforeseen ways in which the past can illuminate and transform the present.

Whip out your tissues, folks!

Fourteen years after his two-year-old son was abducted, Anhui farmer Lei Zekuan (Andy Lau) 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 abductions and trafficking cases on the mainland annually.

FOOTNOTE:

A RUSTIC SETTING IN CHINA, where this Heartbreaking and Compelling Film focusing on GRIEF and its AFTERMATH begins. Stay braced, folks!