Perhaps Love

Movie: Perhaps Love
Date watched: Long time ago, rewatched recently
Venue: Theatre
Watched: With Sis
Cast: Takashi Kaneshiro, Zhou Xun, Jacky Cheung

I must agree, with many, that the musical element of Perhaps Love was overplayed.

The first time I saw the trailer on TV, one thing popped into my head - Moulin Rouge. But no, just as the director said, it's not Moulin Rouge. Moulin Rouge is a musical, but Perhaps Love is not (at least not the kind of musical I know). I would say it displayed the technique of "cut and paste" at its best. (or do they call it montage?)

Although the whole movie was made up of intersecting scenes from the musical within the movie and the movie's reality, it was not a big mess of conflicting moving pictures. The musical scenes and reality scenes complemented each other, and together, they told the story of Sun Na, Lin Jian Dong and Nie Wen in a structured yet beautifully novel manner.

Unlike many love movies that try too hard to evoke emotions in the audience, Perhaps Love adopted a "let me tell you a story" approach, where the audience remains as mere onlookers. Emotions are not conveyed through mushy dialogue and tear-jerking background music. But everything was clearly told by a red eyed Lin Jian Dong repeatedly typing 3 words into his laptop, Nie Wen's back view as he watches himself on screen as the passionate circus master or the little changes in Sun Na's expressive eyes as she listens to Lin Jian Dong's voice recordings.

I like the idea of a narrator in the story, playing an omnipresent phantom in the movie. He begins as a mystical character who collects scenes from people's memory that had been "cut out and thrown away". Then he evolve to seemingly become a character in the musical within the movie, and later a writer who wishes to write Sun Na's memoir. Although he was never always around, his presence could be sensed by strategic appearances in the movie as the chauffeur, or the inquisitive stall tender of a noodle stall. At the end of the movie, he eventually published the memoir and passed a copy to a teary Sun Na, who realises how precious these memories she had tried to forget actually are.

Perhaps the best about this movie, were the multiple twists to the story starting from the second half of the movie. These are, however, not ordinary plot twists that merely change the expected course of the story. It brings out the thought processes of the characters and emotions that they went through. The ending to the musical within the movie was most passionate and meaningful, showing that sacrifice can also be a form of relief. Only after releasing pent up emotions through the circus master's sacrifice could Nie Wen (the director who played the circus master in the musical) finally relax and recover the hunger he always felt after making a movie. He also remembered his forgotten dream of making a simple love movie.

A simple story laden with compound layers of emotions, meticulously and poignantly told.