Though it’s been out in Asia since last Christmas, and out in DVD and VCD for a couple of months, only now is the love story cum musical Perhaps Love, finding its way to North America making an appearance at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
Perhaps Love stars Takeshi Kaneshiro, Zhou Xun and Jacky Cheung as Lin Jin Dong, Sun Wa and Nie Wen respectively, caught in a love triangle of sorts in this musical within a love story. The movie centers around the filming of director Nie’s latest production, a Moulin Rouge-type musical, while his two leads Sun, Nie’s longtime muse and companion, and Lin struggle to come to terms with their own personal history.
Art imitates life as the plot of the Nie’s film which closely mimics the story between Sun and Lin unfolds in the parallel, informing the viewer of the history between the two leads characters. The musical numbers in Nie’s movie, big productions the likes of Chicago and Moulin Rouge, simultaneously advance the plot of Nie’s movie and the parallel story of Sun and Lin.
Perhaps…Love is innovative in it cleverly supports 3 stories – the plot of Nie’s film, the on the set tribulations of shooting Nie’s film and the backstory between Sun and Wa. Moreover, each segment was shot by a different a cinematographer providing a different look and feel between the three segments but nonetheless successful in maintaining a narrative cohesiveness between all of them.
Perhaps…Love will probably draw the strongest comparisons, and rightly, to Moulin Rouge both with its similar story within a story narrative device, style of musical production and even musical similarity in a number of the songs.
However, Perhaps…Love retains its Asian sensibilities in its narrative themes. While Moulin Rouge plays up the "love conquers all," – in fact repeating the line "All you need is love" over and over again, Perhaps…Love is much more pragmatic about the subject. Storywise, Perhaps…Love focuses on the compromises Sun Wa makes to advance her film career, juxtaposing her distant film diva persona of the present, with the innocent free-spirit that fell in love with Lin 10 years earlier. We see her gradual transformation from the latter to the former, the tormented impact on Lin and how they eventually comes to terms with each other.
The character of Sun Wa is also a metaphor for the transformations, both internal and external, mainland China has undergone in the same 10 years that spans the film. Lost is the innocence and selflessness, traded-in for material and career success and a bitchy "all for me" mentality. The film itself serves more outsized reminders as the Lin and Sun eventually return to Beijing, where they first fell in love 10 years ago, to find much of it lost. The noodle shop where they first met closed, the skyline polluted with construction cranes and the walls covered with ebay.com.hk posters as a sign of the Beijing and China as a whole’s rapid economic development.
Still as Sun goes so too, as filmmakers suggest, does mainland China. While Sun doesn’t find redemption at the end of the film, she does find reconciliation. In finally acknowledging the past that she had so vehemently denied at the beginning, the film suggests that China too is leaving its period of blind economic development for a more self-informed era of growth – or perhaps such is the hope of the filmmakers.