`Turn Left, Turn Right' neither here nor there

Jimmy Liao's (幾米) illustration books have always had a contemplative quality, with few conversations and only one or two characters. More "noisy" in the book are the multiple colors, the refined strokes and the imaginative characters, such as rabbits, fish, clowns and witches.

So, to adapt one of his stories into a movie, especially a romance drama, one needs to enrich the plot and create more characters, it might be thought.

Johnny To's Turn Left, Turn Right (向左走, 向右走), is a half-way success in transforming a "silent love story" into a romance comedy film.

On the positive side, Takeshi Kaneshiro (金城武) and Gigi Leung (梁詠琪) look good and seem to match each other on screen. Wai Ka-fai's (韋家輝) script is fluent like his previous successes, such as Needing You and My Left Eye Sees Ghosts. The supporting actors, Edmund Chen (陳之財) and Terri Kwan (關穎) did good jobs in playing the comic roles. To maintains his Cantonese comic lines but adds more of Liao's solitude poetics into this comedy.

Kaneshiro plays a young violinist who lives alone in a Taipei apartment. He's a young talent who only gets to play cheesy tunes in restaurants and subway stations. Same for Leung, working in a publishing company, she likes the poems and novels of Polish writer W. Szymborska. But her boss has asked her to translate horror stories that give her constant nightmares.

The two loners are neighbors but do not know each other. Though they have never met, the audience is made aware that they both have a lot in common with each other. As such, they both wear cute Bohemian clothing with colorful wool hats and scarves. Each rides a bicycle and enjoys peddling around the city. They love art and literature, sitting in the park on a Sunday afternoon and playing with kids or dogs. Also, they both want to go abroad someday for better opportunities. More importantly, it seems, they have not met that someone they were destined to meet.

Like two parallel lines, they always pass each other. Taking elevators at the same time, she goes up and he goes down. They leave a building but take different turns. Taking the MRT, they each stand on on either side of the platform.

One day at a park by the fountain, the two lives finally converge. They chat as though they're old lovers who have been apart for a long time. He plays music for her and she teaches him Polish poems.

Then, he realizes that she was the girl he had a crush on in elementary school, that he remembers sitting on the horse of a merry-go-round, watching her back. Their first meeting goes really well, so they exchange their numbers and leave in the pouring rain, only to find out later that the numbers have smudged in the rain and are now unrecognizable.

The movie is faithful to the book in portraying conveying dream-like pictures and colors. The small Taipei apartments they live in are cute and fantastical. The MRT stations, the fountains in Beitou Park, Warner Village and Hsimenting all look pleasant. From a Hong Kong director's lens Taipei indeed looks lovely.

The biggest problem, however, is that the chemistry between Leung and Kaneshiro is not convincing, even though they look good together. Kaneshiro seems lost despite Leung's best efforts. From the way he looks at Leung and the way he talks to her, you get a dry feeling and it is hard to imagine how he could be suffering from losing her.