ONLY CLOUD KNOWS (ZHI YOU YUN ZHI DAO)

Stars: Xuan Huang, Caiya Yang, Lydia Peckham and Xun Fan.
Writer: Ling Zhang
Director: Feng Xiaogang

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ½

There are two clear reasons for Only Cloud Knows to exist – to wring distraught tears from every ounce of its ill-fated romantic melodrama and to sell the spectacular New Zealand countryside as the best possible backdrop to said sadness. Veteran filmmaker Feng Xiaogang is working on a smaller, more intimate scale than some of his past populist pics (Aftershock, 2010; I Am Not Badame Bovary, 2016; Youth, 2017), but the director’s feel for sellable sentiment and capital-E emoting remains as solid as ever.

Based upon the true story of one of the director’s friends, Only Cloud Knows follows distraught widower Sui ‘Simon’ Dongfeng (Xuan Huang) as he recounts a life spent loving his late wife Luo ‘Jennifer’ Yun (Caiya Yang) across both islands of Aoteoroa. The diaspora experience has been a central theme of many of Feng’s works, dating back to his directorial debut, the TV series A Native of Beijing in New York (1993); others include the LA-set rom-com Be There or Be Square (1998) and If You Are The One (2008), featuring Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido.

Working from a script penned by acclaimed author Ling Zhang, the narrative is split in three distinct acts. The first hour covers those happy days spent by the lovers in the Otago township of Clyde, making enough of a living from the small berg’s only Chinese restaurant while coping with an increasing number of existential tragedies (not least of which is an extended sequence in which the pair weep tears for days as they cope with their old dog’s particularly painful passing).

The second hour recalls the earliest days of their romance in late 1990s Auckland, when Simon had a mullet and played the flute, Jennifer thought herself unfit for marriage only to be won over by his persistence and some spontaneous gambling sets them up for life together. The final passage relentlessly pulls at the heartstrings, with the cancer-riddled Jennifer being held in her final hours by a distraught Simon (all of which he recounts to a very patient charter boat captain, who responds appropriately by taking a big swig from his hip flask).

Support players liven up the occasionally heavyhanded scenes between the lovebirds, notably the terrific Lydia Peckham as waitress-turned-bestie Melinda and renowned Chinese actress Xun Fan as landlady Ms Lin, whose own sad memories supply a rewarding subtext. Shot through the prism of grief and memory, Oscar-nominated DOP Zhao Xiaoding (House of Flying Daggers, 2004; Children of The Silk Road, 2008; The Great Wall, 2016) borrows a rich, primary-colour palette from the master of grand weepies, Douglas Sirk; plot wise, the other clear inspiration is Arthur Hiller’s Love Story (1970). 

Those not in tune with the ripe pleasures to be had from time-shifting romantic tragedies will struggle to make the final handkerchief-filling scenes; if The Notebook, The Lakehouse and/or Somewhere in Time are kept in a drawer under your television, Only Cloud Knows is for you.   

Despite the cast and crew’s best efforts, the true on-screen stars are the green fields, rugged mountains and autumnal shades of The Land of The Long White Cloud; shepherded into life with the aid of The New Zealand Film Commission, the dreamy drama represents another international co-production triumph for the progressive local sector.

ANIMAL WORLD

Stars: Li Yifeng, Michael Douglas, Zhou Dongyu, Cao Bingkun and Wang Ge.
Writer: Han Yan, based on the comic by Nobuyuki Fukumoto.
Director: Han Yan

Rating: 2/5

It is inconceivable that anyone might be pining for a film set in the bowels of a floating warehouse where dozens of desperate sweaty lowlifes take on a maths nerd in a high-stakes game of paper-rock-scissors, but here we are. Here, also, is Hollywood royalty Michael Douglas, who will most likely stay hidden behind the pile of cash he earned to play broad villainy when Animal World pops up in any career re-appraisal.

A Chinese-backed adaptation of Nobuyuki Fukumoto’s manga classic Ultimate Survivor Kaiji, writer/director Han Yan’s latest is a garish, cumbersome, piecemeal film. At different moments, it is a revved-up fantasy actioner, a grimy dystopian-world survival story, a lecture in statistical odds, and a big-screen spin on poker-machine graphics; it strives yet strains to be a convincing mash-up of Snowpiercer, Rainman and The Hunger Games. It fails on all fronts save some technical prowess, resulting in an aggressively pointless 140 minutes of misdirection and incoherence.

A likable Li Yifeng plays down-on-his-luck arcade-clown Zheng Kaisi, a morose figure falling worryingly behind on hospital payments that keep his comatose mother in care. During those moments when life deals him a bum hand, Kaisi disappears into a complex fantasy realm, the ‘Animal World’, where his clown character is a ninja-style assassin who can lay waste an entire train carriage of CGI-generated monsters. His psychic bond to the clown visage dates back to a childhood moment when his family home was raided and his father removed…all while a cartoon clown dispatched evildoers on the television.

With no means to cover hospital costs and having been swindled out of his family’s property assets by backstabbing childhood friend Li Jun (Cao Bingkun), Kaisi is left with no options when Douglas’ silver-haired, cold-blooded boss-man comes calling. He is soon aboard a sort of steam-punk freighter/industrialized cruise ship called ‘Destiny’, one of dozens of men who must collect brass stars and offload cards in a game-show-meets-Vegas version of paper-rock-scissors.

Conceptually, there exists the potential for a twisty, heist-like narrative energy as Kaisi’s beautiful mind starts working the different angles that will win him the ultimate goal – freedom from Destiny and a debt-free existence. But director Yan employs low-rent graphics to explain Kaisi’s in-depth analysis of how to beat the house; the 80-minute mid-section of Animal World is a series of interminable and utterly confounding sequences in which the cards that symbolize the three game options dance about cinematographer Max Da-Yung Wang’s otherwise handsomely filled widescreen.  

The heavily circulated trailer for the film promised a pulsating action-fantasy epic, with lashings of Deadpool-type irreverence, that never materialises. The train-carriage monster slaughter (which recalls better moments from the Men in Black films) and an admittedly terrific car chase all take place in the head of the protagonist; they represent nothing more than showy CGI bluster. Not for the first time but perhaps never quite so egregiously, a trailer has ‘buried the lead’ – Animal World is the Paper-Rock-and-Scissors wannabe-blockbuster that absolutely no one ever asked for. That unofficial fourth option the desperate PRS player calls upon– dynamite – would have come in handy.