Chosen as the closing film for the Busan Film Festival and nominated for seven Golden Horse categories, including best feature, best director and best actor and actress, we’ll find out how Love Education (相愛相親) fares at the award ceremony on Saturday.
Accolades aside, the film is a solid effort by actress-director Sylvia Chang (張艾嘉), who continues her exploration of family relationships, gender roles and, most importantly, facing and reconciling one’s feelings about the past. It’s the first Chang production filmed in China.
Love Education is most often compared to her 2004 effort, 20 30 40, which tells the stories of three women aged 10 years apart. The age difference is bigger here, as we have Chang’s character Huiying, who is retiring, her father’s 90-year-old first wife Nanna (Wu Yanshu, 吳彥姝) and Huiying’s daughter Weiwei (Lang Yueting, 朗月婷), who is about 30 years old. But the plot seems to be more of a carry over from Chang’s previous directorial effort, Murmur of the Hearts (念念).
Photo courtesy of atmovies.com
Set in a nondescript medium-sized Chinese city, Chang wastes no time delving into the dramatic. Huiying’s mother dies in the opening scene, and despite not leaving any clear instructions, Huiying takes it upon herself to move her father’s grave from his home village to the city. However, her father’s first wife, who was left behind in the village a few months after their arranged marriage, refuses to let her take the body, resulting in a comical scuffle that ends with Huiying and her family being chased away by angry villagers brandishing farming tools.
This sets the tone for the rest of the film, which is driven by Huiying’s headstrong, insensitive and controlling personality, which often alienates those around her, including her husband (Tian Zhuangzhuang, 田壯壯) and daughter.
Huiying is not a particularly likable character, but her personality makes the plot work — with Chang playing the role perfectly as she spends much of the film going from government office to office (upsetting more people along the way) trying to obtain legal proof of her parents’ marriage.
The burial dispute is the main impetus, but Chang weaves many subplots into the film to nicely fill out the story, including her impending retirement from her job as a schoolteacher and her fragile relationship with her daughter and husband. We eventually understand why she is so adamant that her parents be buried together, going as far as to threaten Nanna with a lawsuit.
Weiwei becomes involved more than she had expected as the Jerry Springer-style television show she works for wants to feature the dispute between Huiying and Nanna, and eventually even drags her rock singer boyfriend into the mix. Her relationship also becomes one of the subplots.
Some subtle touches are added here and there to heighten the fragility of human bonds and emotions, including encounters with the opposite sex by both Huiying and her husband that may or may not turn into something more, which adds some extra tension. The film could have done without these scenes, but it’s a good thing that they were left in.
All three female leads deliver strong performances, most notably Wu, who successfully portrays the complex layers underneath this taciturn yet passionate woman who suddenly twists people’s ears when she’s mad. The contrast and similarities between the three women’s lives — especially that of Nanna and Weiwei — show that no matter how generations change, human emotions remain the same and they face similar dilemmas though in drastically different contexts.
With many feature films nowadays set amid unrealistically beautiful scenery, it’s probably a conscious choice to feature this one in a drab Chinese city and a pretty standard looking village. Love Education is probably not going to make you cry, but not all dramas have to. In a cinematic world saturated with mushy dialogue only a teenager would believe, this is more of a low-key, mature dose of reality that manages to stay entertaining and relevant at the same time.
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