Language of Love

I don't know what it is about Asian cinema that is so appealing. Perhaps it's the gorgeous cinematography that plays the colors of Asian diversity and is devoid of Hollywood celluloid? Or is it the storytelling that speaks of seeming innocence and pureness even if the story itself is far from pleasant? Or is it because of the familiarity of the sceneries, despite the glaring differences from my own culture?

About Love is composed of three stories set in Tokyo, Taipei and Shanghai. The characters could be connected but again, they may be not. The stories and their respective endings actually play with the imagination of the audience and for someone like me, a frustrated scriptwriter, it is an opportunity to conjure what the ending would have been like.

Tokyo is the story of Yao, a Taiwanese who is in the city to hone his skills in cartoon drawing. (As he said, England is for footballers, Hollywood for filmmakers... and I forgot the rest.) He runs into Michiko, a sad-looking girl, and follows her. He finds out she is an artist and is in the process of finishing a huge painting. He observes her from the distance and while he cannot draw a decent cartoon in class, actually surprised himself when he starts to draw her. He leaves these drawings on the door of her studio and Michiko, who is recovering from a heartbreak, slowly cheers up. On the day that he finally made a coloured drawing of her, he found that she had finished her painting and had left the studio. The studio owner tells him where she would be and he followed her, only to find himself in a busy intersection trying to spot her in the morning crowd (not sure if this was Ginza or Shinjuku). Just when you think they won't ever meet, the drawings that Michiko had been holding suddenly go flying in the air and that's when Yao sees her.

Yao is played by Chen Bo-lin, the lead actor of Blue Gate Crossing, another of my favorite Taiwanese film. His acting in that movie has been acclaimed and in About Love, he shows his talent again.

Taipei starts off with Ah-Su on all fours in her apartment tracing something on a piece of wood. We soon realise that she is making a bookshelf and proceeds to hammer all through the night, prompting her neighbor to scream "let us get some sleep!" If this happened in the Philippines, neighbors would have started shouting "hooy, magpatulog ka naman!" Ah-Su is a spunky girl (she does her carpentry job in a mini skirt) and when she is done with the bookshelf, she proceeds to prop it up. Or at least she tries, but it is so big and heavy she could not do it alone. She picks up the phone and calls Tecchan, who turns out to be a young Japanese she met in a bar. Tecchan (who looks like Vanness Wu if not for his unruly hair) hurries to the apartment expecting a one-night stand but is confronted with a huge bookshelf on the floor instead. He also cannot speak Mandarin so for the next few minutes, Ah-Su tries to explain to him with hand gestures that she needed help in propping up the bookshelf. The scene was quite hilarious and which I could relate to as the two, who could barely speak each other's language, tried desperately to communicate, with comical results.

Finally, the bookshelf is standing and now Ah-Su wants Tecchan's help to paint it. They start to clown around as they paint and at one point had an impromptu dance number. Then just as you thought they were going to fall in love (as if that happens with a click of a finger in real life, but they, this is a movie!), Ah-Su breaks down and confesses to Tecchan that she just broke up with her boyfriend and is still hurting. When morning comes, she asks him to go with her to find the ex-boyfriend. She teaches him how to talk to him in Mandarin, he practices and finally gets to meet the ex-boyfriend. When he returns to Ah-Su, he spends a good hour (in the movie, it must have been no more than 10 minutes) relating to her what the ex-boyfriend said. And as Mandarin is a phonetic language, some of the words got mixed up and did not make any sense at all. They both looked frustrated and the audience, while frustrated too for they too could not make out what the ex-boyfriend said, was laughing. As Tecchan drove her home, she thanked him for being there for her. Later, Tecchan called someone in Tokyo to thank this girl.

The third story, Shanghai, is about a Japanese named Shubei who went to the city to study Mandarin. I vaguely remember him as the Japanese language teacher of Yao in the first episode who even tells the class that he was leaving for Shanghai, but then I could be mistaken. He stays in a house owned by a woman and her daughter, Yun, who falls in love with him. Shubei is waiting for a mail from his girlfriend in Japan and when it finally came, it only gave him sad news. The following morning, Yun found the postcard of Barcelona's Sagrada Familia, torn into pieces and scattered at the front of her mother's shop. She picked them up, dried them in the microwave and started to piece together the message, even asking Shubei what certain Japanese characters meant. The poor Shubei did not suspect what she was up to and helped her. Finally, Yun pieced the postcard's message and realised that Shubei's girlfriend had gone to Spain and broke up with him. But then the time came for him to return to Tokyo and as they were saying goodbye, Yun told him "te quero", telling him it meant goodbye and sayonara in Spanish. As the cab drove away, Shubei leaned out of the window and waved merrily at Yun shouting "te quero, te quero!"

A year later, Shubei has returned to Shanghai and had gone to the Spanish tapas bar where he used to work. There were some Spanish students there and as they were leaving, he wished them "te quero". It was then he found out that the phrase did not mean goodbye, but I love you. He went back to where Yun lived but their house had been torn down. He stands by the brick wall where he used to teach her how to play baseball and pretends he's throwing the ball (which he left in his room) at it. You could hear the ball's echo and suspects that Yun must have been spending a lot of time playing there.

I thought Takashi Tsukamoto, the actor who played Shubei, was the same actor in All About Lily Chou, a dark Japanese movie about Japanese teenagers. But it turned out they just look very similar.

I couldn't quite pinpoint which episode I liked the best. I liked Yao (despite his weird hairstyle these days) and the charming Michiko, the way the director and writer played around with the theme of "two people who always find themselves in one place, but never meet". I also liked the Taipei episode because of Ah-Su's cookiness while disguising the pain inside her and Tecchan's naivete. And of course, Shubei and Yun's story, trying to piece the puzzle together (similar to Yun piecing the Barcelona postcard) and not quite getting at it (the ending was bitin).

Like I said, the characters in the movie may or may not be connected. For instance:
* Are Michiko's ex-boyfriend (who took only three seconds to tell her on the phone their relationship had ended and five seconds to ask her back) and Shubei's ex-girlfriend somehow connected?

All we know is that Michiko's ex-BF told her that he met the "woman of his dreams" in Spain. Shubei's ex-GF was in Barcelona and when she wrote that postcard, she told him that she did not share his dreams anymore.

* Is Yuki (or something), the Japanese girl in the Tokyo episode, the same Yuki that Tecchan calls from Taipei?

And then the endings:
* After Yao and Michiko finally met at the intersection (she said "ni hao", he said "konichiwa"), will they end up together?

* Will Tecchan and Ah-Su ever become "more than friends"?

* Will Shubei ever find Yun?

So many hanging questions, just like life itself.

Note: Photos from the movie's official website.