Marital Drama
Cecilia Yip steals the show as a woman happy to not let go of her husband.
True Love, For ONce in my Life
Director: Delon Siu • Writers: Lou Shiu-wa, Sabrina Tse, based on the book by Tse
Starring: Cecilia Yip, Tse Kwan-ho, Hui Yuet-sheung, Himmy Wong, Stephanie Che
Hong Kong • 1hr 50mins
Opens Hong Kong Mar 7 • I
Grade: B-
In many ways, first time director Delon Siu Koon-ho’s True Love, For Once in My Life | 淺淺歲月 is one of those crumbling marriage movies we’ve seen a million times before. Marriages were falling apart left, right and centre in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. The Reality Television Industrial Complex relies on fracturing relationships to sustain itself. Canadian documentarian Allan King made the OG marriage reality mess in 1969 in A Married Couple. Most recently Noah Baumbach did an up-close and personal examination of matrimonial disintegration in Marriage Story. Strangely, the granular cinematic examination of marital distress isn’t as common in Hong Kong, or in Asia, despite the fact that people who commit to each other and sometimes grow apart to disastrous ends is a universal constant.
To that end it’s Siu and Hong Kong indie godfather Fruit Chan (as producer) to the rescue with the quasi-experimental, iPhone-shot adaptation of Sabrina Tse Shuk-fun’s autobiographical novel, which Tse co-wrote with Lou Shiu-wa (Hong Kong Family, The Way We Are, “Headmaster” in Septet). It’s a marriage drama so there’s not a lot of narrative, but there doesn’t need to be, because the film is essentially a meditation on the concept of destiny and soulmates; on romance versus love. True Love just takes that most peculiar of Hong Kong roads to get there: cross-border infidelity. This is going to land hard.
About as drab as their lives
Siu may be taking the big chair for the first time, but he’s been working as an art director, production designer and writer for years – often with Chan – so it’s obvious he came to the material and the artistic method of realising it with specific ideas. Siu shot with no extra gear, no additional filters, no lens modifiers, nothing that makes our phone snaps/videos look more polished than they truly are. True Love isn’t the first film to shoot on an iPhone: Steven Soderbergh’s done it (Unsane). Oscar winner Sean Baker’s done it (way back on a 5S with an anamorphic adaptor for Tangerine). Liao Ming-yi did it, perhaps most successfully, for I WeirDO and Danny Boyle (!) allegedly shot the second sequel to 28 Days Later (!!), 28 Years Later, on a 15 Pro Max (!!!). Great. What the world needs now is Apple with even bigger delusions of grandeur. But I digress. The point is that for True Love, the rough and raw images (and yes, some will say “cheap”) work for the fly-on-the-wall, documentary-style storytelling at play here. The natural-feeling light, the imperfect framing and sometimes washed out colour make it feel as if we’re spying on the main characters’ most intimate and painful moments across 20-odd years.
Veteran Cecilia Yip Tung plays Sabrina, a relatively well-to-do office worker with two children, married to Andrew (Tse Kwan-ho, A Guilty Conscience, Cesium Fallout), a nondescript bizniz dude taking advantage of China’s entry into the WTO to make a fortune shuttling back and forth to Guangzhou. Sabrina and Andrew have a history that goes back way farther than marriage, all the way to childhood, and Sabrina is quite confident that Andrew is it for her. Naturally, as is common in the SAR, he winds up with a mainland mistress, and Sabrina and Andrew divorce. He remarries. She doesn’t. She’s had her “true love”, which only comes once.
Yip is the star here, cycling through the various stages contentment, confusion, rage, despondency and acceptance with a lot of grace and a shocking level of resonance. Yip knows this woman, perhaps is this woman, and she does a tremendous job juggling Sabrina’s often conflicting emotions and keeping her dignified. She tries her best to move on but thinks her happiness ship has sailed. She tries to keep it together for her children but they don’t fully grasp the dynamics at play – so Sabrina’s the bad guy. She tries getting drunk, later filling her time with salsa lessons. Then Yip has to kick it up a notch when Andrew comes back to Hong Kong to treat what could be a terminal illness. If we don’t totally believe Sabrina is selfless enough to set aside her own pain for the good of her “one true love” and agree to help him when he needs her the film falls apart. But we do, and whether or not we agree with her decision is irrelevant, because Yip grounds the character in such recognisable human behaviour we simply chalk it up to her beliefs. Sabrina and Andrew’s daughter (Hui Yuet-sheung) finally gets it, and there’s a nice moment late in the film where the two privately memorialise Andrew, with the younger woman unwinding what she thought was her mother’s naïveté as a kid with the reality. Chances are she’d never forgive such a betrayal and stay by an ex-husband’s bedside until his last breath, but that’s the question at the heart of True Love. Personally? True love is myth and the cheating husband? He can rot.