Dream Lovers
Song Yu: Chow Yun-Fat
Yuet-Heung: Brigitte Lin
Wah Lei: Cher Yeung
IMDb link: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0091510
other links:
Version reviewed: DVD
Ratings:
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DVD Audio: 8 of 10
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DVD Video: 9 of 10
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Subtitles: 8 of 10
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Story: 9 of 10
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Performances: 9 of 10
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CYF: 9 of 10
This is a film about which widely diverging opinions are held. You'll either
love it or hate it, find it beautiful and captivating or find it pretentious
and self-consciously highbrow. It all depends on your tastes. To me,
this film was mesmerizing, a dream within a dream which held me spellbound
from beginning to end.
What I like best about this film is the characterizations by the three
main actors. Chow Yun-Fat portrays Song Yu, a talented young composer and conductor
of the New York Chinese Philharmonic Orchestra. Though at the outset he
is playful and animated, as he sinks deeper and deeper into the central
mystery of the film we see that much of this is just a facade; a dark,
brooding Song Yu emerges, ominously intent on only one thing: the love
of not only his life, but his lives, Yuet-Heung (Brigitte Lin).
Yuet-Heung, the pampered Ferrari-driving daughter of an eminent archaeologist,
tinkers with relics of the past at both her home, furnished with precious
historical objects, and her work - she is a jeweler, crafting pieces using ancient
stones. As time pushes her nearer to Song Yu, other relics of the past, in the
form of vivid memory-dreams, begin to haunt her. As if against her will she
seeks out Song Yu and, out of a city of millions of souls, finds the one to
which she is bound. In one fateful afternoon, Yuet-Heung and Song Yu go from
complete strangers to fate-entangled lovers.
The apex of this triangle is Wah Lei, Song Yu's mate of seven years. In a
gut-wrenching performance by Cher Yeung, we see a woman who literally lives
for her man; Song Yu is the sun around which she orbits, drawing heat and light
for her own life from him. When she is set adrift (in an agonizing sequence of
scenes between she and Song Yu) she is left in the deep, dark cold. The magic of
Cher Yeung's performance is that while we can emphathise with her, we cannot
sympathise with her; it is terrible what she is going through but in the end it
is her own weakness which destroys her.
An incredible techno-synth soundtrack add to the feeling of disjointed time; the
flashback scenes are spliced seamlessly into the narrative and the blending of
the ancient and the contemporary are eerie, disquieting in their own sort of
absurd beauty.
While consciously stylish, this film does not suffer the pitfalls of another
of Tony Au's films, The Last Affair as it never wallows in its own supposed
sophistication, instead relying on solid performances, beautiful visuals and
music as well as an intriguing storyline.
This film like no other gives you the reason behind the proverb "be careful what
you wish for, for you may get it".
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