by Finnlay Dall
Worth: $5.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Sandra Ng Kwun-Yu, MC Cheung, Stephy Tang Lai-Yan, Chan Fai-hung
Intro:
… a flawed execution leaves the audience catfished.
Long time screenwriter and first-time director, Ho Miu-Kei creates a rom-com with a most unlikely pairing: a scammer and his wealthy victim. However, a flawed execution leaves the audience catfished.
After one of the biggest scam call centres in Hong Kong is raided by the police, officers try to make sense of the investigation by interviewing two major players in the case. The first, the latest victim of the centre, 52-year-old Veronica Yu (Ng Kwun-Yu) – a wealthy gynaecologist running her own highly successful practice, who, desperate to find love again after the death of her ex-husband, creates a fake dating profile on the fictional Matchly. The second, 26-year-old Joe Lee (MC Cheung), the newbie at the centre, who happens to be Veronica’s unfortunate match, having successfully stolen over $4,000,000USD in funds from her bank account.
The first half of Love Lies is told Guy Ritchie style, as Joe and Veronica treat us to a series of flashbacks of how they ended up crossing paths; she a lonely widow, looking for love, and he, a meek manchild, stumbling under the wing of a conman going by the pseudonym, Mr. White (Chan Fai-hung). However, unlike the eccentric cast of The Gentlemen, the film immediately lacks any of that same energy. Kwun-Yu and Cheung accent their scenes with lifeless voiceover and never quite sell their roles on screen. Cheung especially, as someone who’s supposed to have grown into this suave and confident black market businessman persona, still comes off just as downtrodden as when he started, despite what his clean haircut and newly pressed shirt would have you believe. Meanwhile, Mr. White’s merry band of crooks consist of a whole hive of nameless drones, and one former sultry TV supervisor turned backstory consultant, Joan (Stephy Tang Lai-Yan).
Whatever energy Miu-Kei loses in the plot, she tries to gain in the edit. When Joe starts his orientation, the audience is flooded with visuals of search engines, doctored photos and social media posts, all passing before we have even had a chance to absorb the ‘plan of attack’. The lack of proper pacing disorients the viewer, leaving even something as simple as a Steven Soderbergh style heist breakdown feeling needlessly confusing. The rushed and borderline obtrusive edits create a sleight of hand – an excuse to omit a lack of planning or depth in the writing.
Once Joe’s guilt forces him to be more honest with Veronica, they begin to open their hearts to each other. It’s when their romance enters the realm of legitimate possibility that the film finds its stride, at the midpoint – albeit marginally.
There has been a recent trend in cinema to focus on the elderly and their run-ins with scammers. The Beekeeper has Jason Statham take revenge on the callers who bankrupted his elderly neighbour, while the group of elderly vigilantes of this year’s Thelma take matters into their own hands. Both films unsurprisingly paint scam callers as either unequivocal monsters, bumbling idiots or both. Instead, Miu-Kiu frames the second half of Love Lies as a tried and true rom-com (with allusions to Wong Kar-wai for good measure). Her ambition: exploring the psychology of those who enjoy crafting schemes and those who fall for them – and whether the loneliness shared by both parties could drive them to find true love.
While her intentions are certainly present, her commitment to take those same themes seriously is another matter altogether. As Joe says to the police when questioned about his interest in Veronica, “if … people aren’t committed, it simply isn’t romance.” Joe and Veronica do share a handful of intimate moments, despite being separated by a phone screen. A particular stand out is when Joe calls Veronica after his IRL girlfriend, Yumi, breaks up with him, suggesting he move out of her house and cut contact with her father; whose outgoing personality and love of soccer has given Joe the closest thing he has ever had to a parent. Meanwhile, having just slipped in the bathroom, spraining her foot in the process and realising she has no one in her life to help her get to the hospital, Veronica accepts Joe’s call. As they both lay down, defeated by their own loneliness, the pair decide to wordlessly enjoy the love found in each other’s breathing through the phone.
However, these sweet moments are not only sparse but are undercut heavily by the same thoughtless editing that plagued the first half of the film. In that same intimate reprieve, Veronica holds the phone up to chest, only for the audience to be blasted with a stock sound effect of a heart beating. The camera is consistent in its failure to capture Joe or Veronica as protagonists, let alone any of the intimate scenes with them together. Handheld, unsteady and unsure, the cinematography feels like a romance film cobbled together from corporate stock footage. And the score, despite emulating typical rom-coms – the string arrangement that tugs at the heart or the soulful piano that accents the butterflies in the stomach – is treated like filler, a cacophony of forgettable and royalty free tracks.
It’s baffling that such a simple, as Veronica puts it, “love affair” should lack the most basic necessities of both the crime and romance genre. It at least delivers on some laughs – even if they are weak chuckles at most. And while there are small moments of tenderness throughout, it is hard to recommend watching Love Lies in a theatre, as audiences are more likely to feel scammed by the final product.
