Romance

Propelled to fame playing regal beauties in grandiose historical dramas such as Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell my Concubine, Chinese actress Gong Li takes a professional U-turn in this bittersweet romance with hints of French cinema from director Zhou Sun, recasting herself as Zhou Yu, a thoroughly modern, independent woman whose sexuality is part of her personality. Torn between two lovers, the ethereal introvert and the easygoing charmer, Gong takes comfort in somnolent train journeys through the countryside of northwest China. Zhou Yu’s Train is adapted from the novel by Cun Bei.
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Lyrical and expressive, The Road Home represents a significant shift from more analytical and politically charged films concerning the period of Chinese history which preceded the Cultural Revolution. Dealing with the relationship between city and country, old and new, the film portrays love pursued in youth and fiercely remembered in old age. It is a tale of constancy and devotion against the odds in which the past represents the stability of family values and village customs; political tension is also hinted at, and occasionally bubbles to the surface. The present, on the other hand, is cold and uncertain. The young have moved away from the villages, and the old traditions are dying out. Traditional skills perfected over a lifetime are rejected for commercialism. The adage ”Know the past, know the present” resonates with inreasing sentiment as it is repeated throughout the film.

Zhang Yimou, who also directed Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, and The Story of Qiu Ju, was formerly a cinematographer, and he is adept at stirring up emotions with his mastery of colour and mood. He possesses an intense awareness of the natural world, revealing in his camerawork the glory of the changing seasons, the weather and the gorgeous landscape of towering mountains, crisp snow and lush, golden fields. San Bao’s impassioned soundtrack, reminiscent of James Horner’s theme music for Titanic, represents a full-blooded escape from the political heavy-handedness that dogged Zhang’s earlier Mao-era features, lending this elemental love story an emotional grandeur.

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After the successful fusion of uninhibited bawdiness and showbiz satire in The 40 Year Old Virgin and pregnancy-centric rom-com Knocked Up, current chieftain of Hollywood comedy Judd Apatow looks to have scored another hit with Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Once again he takes a situation that really shouldn’t be funny – in this case the break-down of a long-term relationship – and sucks from it every last drop of laughs.

When Peter Bretter (Jason Segel), a genial underachiever who composes incidental music for American TV shows, is dumped by his beautiful actress girlfriend, Sarah Marhall (Kristen Bell), he is devastated. Standing stark naked in his kitchen and weeping buckets, he begs her to stay, but to no avail – her success has outstripped his and she has bigger fish to fry. He seeks solace in one-night stands but is haunted by Sarah’s memory. Tired of womanising, he takes advice from his step-brother Brian (Bill Hader) and escapes to Hawaii, only to discover that Sarah and her rock star boyfriend Aldous Snow (Russell Brand) are staying in the same hotel. The set up is textbook farce. Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of Rachel (Mila Kunis), the pretty hotel receptionist with whom Peter strikes up a relationship.

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Love in the Time of Cholera is based on the sumptuous, florid novel by Nobel Prize winning Columbian author Gabriel García Márquez. The film adaptation by Mike Newell, who is best known for Four Weddings and a Funeral and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, just goes to show that the best novels rarely work well on the big screen.

The setting is the small Columbian town of Cartanega around the year 1900. The young clerk Florentino (played by Unax Ugalde as a teenager and Javier Bardem as an adult) catches a glimpse of wealthy beauty Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) through an open window as he is going about on an errand. A poet of sorts, Florentino eventually wins Fermina’s heart by writing letters to her and the two embark on a breathless courtship (complete with Romeo and Juliet balcony scene).

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The beguilingly titled Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is based on writer/director’s Dai Saijie’s best-selling autobiographical novel of the same name. Set in the Chinese Cultural Revolution during the 1970’s, the film centres around two adolescents who have committed the sin of being born to “reactionary” parents – doctors who dared to suggest that Chairman Mao might not be entirely perfect. On account of their background, the boys are sent on a rural “re-education” camp where they are to learn the virtues of Maoist thinking and hard work, which includes much lugging of human excrement up a hill.

However, their gruelling stay is brightened by meeting the captivating daughter of the local tailor, known simply as the Little Seamstress (the boys never bother to find out her actual name). An uneducated peasant, the two bourgeois city-boys seek to open her mind through forbidden Western novels which they have stolen from another member of the camp — classics from the likes of Dickens, Flaubert and, yes, Balzac, the Little Seamstress’ favourite. The boys also read “The Count of Monte Christo” to the old grandfather, which inspires him to add many elegant details to his garments.

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Nothing is quite what it seems in Laetitia Colombani’s creepy romantic thriller He loves me… he loves me not. The film opens with promising art student Angelique played by Audrey Tautou (Amelie, The Da Vinci Code) entering a flower shop and sweet-talking the manager into giving her a single rose to send to her loved-one, the handsome cardiologist Loic (Samuel Le Bihan). Next we see Loic sniffing the flower, evidently touched.

Loic is in fact married, with a pregnant wife, but this doesn’t seem to bother Angelique in the slightest. She confidently informs her concerned friend Héloïse (Sophie Guillemin) that Loic is sure to leave her so they can settle down together, and from what we see of their relationship, it could be true.

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A departure from the gargantuan historical epics such as Farewell my Concubine and Temptress Moon for which director Chen Kaige made his name, Together With You is an unashamedly sentimental tale of love between father and son which faces strong, raw emotions like love and ambition head-on. Warning: invest in a large box of tissues before viewing.

The film centre on Liu Xiaochun (Tang Yun), a 13-year-old violin prodigy who lives in a provincial town with his father Liu Cheng (Liu Peiqi), a cook. Cheng is determined that his son’s talents not be wasted, and, stashing his meager savings in his red peasant hat, he travels with Xiaochun to Beijing for a competition which Cheng hopes will give the boy the big break he needs. As it happens, Xiaochun has no chance of winning, since the corrupt judges are swayed by contributions from rich parents, but, determined not to be defeated, Cheng persuades the eccentric professor Jiang (Wang Zhwen) to teach his son.

Jiang, a heartbroken recluse who lives in a hovel surrounded by stray cats and dirty laundry, teaches Xiaochun to play with his heart. Meanwhile Xiaochun teaches Jaing some self-respect and the two form a close bond. However Cheng soon feels it’s time to move his son onto a better teacher – the famous Yu Shifeng, played by director Chen Kaige himself.

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Italian for beginners is a touching and enduring romantic comedy set in a dreary suburb of Copenhagen. It portrays the lives of six lonely thirty-somethings looking for love and a sense of purpose who enroll in a beginners’ class in Italian run by the local council. Written and directed by Lone Scherfig (On Our Own), the film follows the guidelines of Dogma 95, the ascetic filmmaking code advanced by Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and others which forbids expensive and spectacular special effects in order to focus on the purity of storyline and script.

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Recently, police in Japan arrested Tatsuko Horikawa, a 58-year old woman who had secretly moved into a man’s flat without him knowing; she had hidden in a cupboard and emerged during the daytime whilst the owner was at work. The 57-year-old man who owned the house became suspicious after food kept disappearing from his fridge, and so he set up a surveillance system, filming the woman as she walked around in his absence.

According to police, she had dragged a mattress into the small space and slept there for nearly a year. French news agency AFP quoted a local police spokesman as saying. “She told police that she had nowhere to live… She seems to have lived there for about a year, but not all the time.”

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This Academy Award winning teen comedy drama blindsided people when it appeared, apparently from out of nowhere last year, winning over US audiences with its unconventional handling of teenage pregnancy, sharp comic dialogue, and gentle-yet-deliberate pacing.

The titular heroine, 16 year old high school attendee Juno MacGuff, discovers she is pregnant by her longtime friend, boy-next-door type Paulie, and initially intends to have an abortion. After deciding against, she then begins making arrangements for a closed adoption.

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