A sugar-coated holiday flick

As another adaptation of Taiwanese illustration book author Jimmy Liao's (幾米) Turn Left, Turn Right(向左走, 向右走), Sound of Colors (地下鐵) is a movie loaded with beautiful stars. It's also another romance comedy that is expected to do well at the box office.

Unfortunately, the film has turned out to be a colorful and beautiful picture that looks like an extended version of a music video. It may be creative in creating characters and plot for the originally thinly-plotted illustration book and the performances are on the whole OK, but the result is less than the sum of its parts.

The original story of Sound of Colors is basically about a blind girl's lonely journey walking aimlessly through different MRT stations. The girl has a rich imagination and "sees" in her heart the colorful wonderland that is the world of the underground.

The blind girl finds love, while a parallel romance takes place in a Shanghai subway station. Basically, fans of Liao's book should not expect a faithful adaptation. Rather, they should see it as a romance comedy with the Liao-style paintbox of bright colors, in which characters are clad with stylish, fluffy sweaters and scarves. The theme songs are in French, to add atmosphere.

Tony Leung (梁朝偉) and Miriam Yeung's (楊千樺) romance is convincing. Leung plays an untrustworthy matchmaker who accidentally meets the kind-hearted and optimistic blind young woman. He plays the silly, complacent guy who gets panicky and frustrated when he inexplicably goes blind one morning. The sweet Yeung comes to see him and teaches him to adjust to a sightless life.

In another plot line, Chang, an advertising company sales representative in Taipei sends a Christmas card to a girl whom he has a crush on. But the love letter is somehow switched and goes to Shanghai.

His Shanghai client,, Dong Jie, a young business woman replies, revealing that she is also recovering from a failed lover affair. Chang then flies to Shanghai to find her. They meet in the subway, and, naturally enough, they fall for each other.

The romance of the Hong Kong couple, Leung and Yeung, looks more natural, because the details about how they cope with problems are more authentic. But the Shanghai romance is just plain cheesy.

Even more artificial is the character of Wing Fan (范 偉), who is the mysterious angel who either appears as a toy soldier or a homeless person in the subway station.

He is the one who secretly matches up the two couples. Somehow his short appearances do not connect too well to the plot and rather than feeling this is a miracle, the overwhelming thought is: this is a bit bizarre.