One of the keys to the parallel romance/different eras tale is to make sure the modern day half is more compelling than its anachronistic friend; you don’t want viewers at the end of the film saying, “could we go back to the 50s? I liked that couple better.”
So, funny story …
Brokenhearted from an altar jilting, Jin Tian (Likun Wang) has retreated to Prague, where her grandmother had her heart broken decades earlier. Jin doesn’t know this exactly when she takes up shop and posts a “to do” list that includes getting a tattoo, getting drunk, and having a one-night stand. While attempting to combine the last two, she ends up passing out at the home of professional cellist Peng Ze Yang (Yifan Wu). And in a span of five minutes on screen, we discover he’s a single father; the wife is gone. He lives with a divorced mother; her husband is gone. And Jin discovers a “miss you forever” letter from her grandmother’s 1940s lover.
Oh, it’s gonna be one of these films, is it?
Once the post WWII storyline is introduced, Somewhere Only We Know (You yi ge di fang zhi you wo men zhi dao) gets to flip back and forth in time showing young, hot grandma falling in love with stuntman Gordon Alexander (he plays a Czech doctor who lost his wife and daughter to concentration camps – I told it you it was one of these movies, didn’t I?) The 40s tale of romance is a little flimsy, as is the 21st C. version, for that matter. The 40s version, however, seems a great deal more earnest. It’s easy to see the new Chinese secretary at the clinic falling for the broken man and it’s easy to see him falling back.
In the modern tale, Jin wakes up after a night of gin and is immediately at a disadvantage to the smug Peng. This seems exacerbated when they both work a wedding – he in the band, she waitressing and then a standoffish
reunion leads to a failed kiss. I had trouble believing in, pretty much, every aspect of this story – not the least of which being where does cello-dude place his daughter when he goes places? ‘Cuz I know he doesn’t leave her with crazy mom.
If you’re a more hopeless romantic than I, or perhaps didn’t need the captions (I’m quite certain something was lost in translation more than once), this might be an adequate way to pass a dateless Valentine’s; otherwise, don’t bother.
♪I walked across a foreign land
Failing to complete a one-night stand
I caught a letter, came from my kin
The kind of plot device that kinda wears thin
Modern romance, where have you gone?
This coupling needs something greater to rely on.
So send me back to long ago
The courtship there is much better you know♫
Not Rated, 120 Minutes
D: Jinglei Wu
W: Shuo Wang, Yun Wang, Jinglei Xu, Meng Zhao
Genre: The tragedy of love
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Broken people
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Noobs
♪ Parody inspired by “Somewhere Only We Know”
