Loving You - Reformation Of A Prick

Jul

3

Loving You - Reformation Of A Prick

≡ Category: Action, Drama, Hong Kong, Movie Reviews By Country, Recommended |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Drama
Director: Johnny To
Year: 1995

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE

An early collaboration between actor Lau Ching Wan and director Johnny To, Loving You chronicles the reformation of a worthless jerk of a husband.

Inspector Lau (Lau Ching Wan) essentially puts his wife Carman (Carman Lee) last — after his job, his drinking, and whatever bimbo wants to have sex with him that night. But after a life changing experience, he begins to reevaluate her importance to him.

Lau Ching Wan is excellent in what amounts to a character study with a little action thrown in, but American audiences will probably have a hard time with the psychology of Lau Ching Wan’s character. It’s a little easier to understand if you know a little bit about the Chinese culture — men tend to be overvalued and women undervalued. All sorts of male misbehavior is winked at that would never be tolerated in the United States.

So, when Lau Ching Wan humiliates his wife by standing her up for a dinner at home with his mother in law and has sex with a cop groupie instead, it makes sense. When he throws a temper tantrum out of nowhere and tosses the dinner he’s just made for her on the floor and tells her to get out and not come back, it’s explicable in the context of the culture. At a critical moment, when Inspector Lau has a gun drawn on his nemesis in a room filled with natural gas, with his pregnant wife by his side, the hero makes a surprising decision, which does not reflect well on his character. These sorts of moments make it very difficult for a Western audience to maintain their affection for Inspector Lau.

It’s a good thing Inspector Lau is being played by Lau Ching Wan, one of the most charismatic and likeable actors in the world, and that his wife is being played by the lovely Carman Lee. After Inspector Lau’s near death experience, he has a moment when he can’t look his wife in the eyes. In that one wordless moment, you understand that Inspector Lau realizes that he doesn’t deserve to hold onto his wife and that there’s no way he can make up for the way he’s treated her. On her part, Carman has been driven into an affair by her husband Lau’s brutally callous mistreatment, and is pregnant with a baby that is not his. This is viewed by the screenplay to be almost as big a transgression as Lau’s negligence and philandering, another stumbling block for an American audience.

The last problem for an American audience is the covers of two well-known songs, I’m Easy and To Love Somebody. To Chinese ears, maybe they sound okay, but for an American, they’re pretty pitiful, and they’re featured prominently throughout Loving You.

The action sequences, when they come, are in a different style from the Golden Age of Hong Kong standard, hewing closer to the American style of shooting action. Instead of showing a stunt from start to finish, complete with falls, director Johnnie To employs jump cuts, so you get a sense of the action, rather than the action itself. His strategy works, in large part because the emphasis of the picture isn’t on the action, but the relationship between Inspector Lau and his wife. Director To does come up with one memorable piece of business, when a gunman improvises a soda bottle as a silencer.

Should you make the effort to track down a DVD of Loving You? That depends. If you’re a big fan of either Johnnie To or Lau Ching Wan, Loving You is required viewing. For everyone else, Loving You is good, not great. One last disavantage of Loving You is that it’s only available in DVD-3 format, which isn’t readable on a standard American DVD player. The solution to that, of course, is to get an all region DVD player, such as the Phillips DVP 5140, which you should have anyway so you can easily watch Russian, Italian, and Hong Kong imports at will. (For more information, check out my article Why You Need a Multi-Region PAL/NTSC DVD Player.)