RATING: 3.5/5
One of HK's definitive romantic classic, AN AUTUMN'S TALE is a timeless date movie that boosts with two perfectly breakthrough leads by Chow Yun-Fat and Cherie Chung. This is also among director Mabel Cheung and screenwriter Alex Law's most accomplished motion pictures ever made. Need more evidence? The movie had also scored an impressive 7 Hong Kong Film Awards nomination and won three including Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography.
The story here is decidedly simple enough: After spending two years of saving enough money, the shy and beautiful Jennifer (Cherie Cheung) is moving to New York to study acting. Her parents has arranged for her to live in the same apartment block with her distant cousin nicknamed Boat Head (Chow Yun-Fat), whom they figured he's a sort of respected local leader in Chinatown and also rich. Not only that, she also anticipating to reunite with her boyfriend Vincent (Danny Chan Bak-Keung) from Boston. But once Jennifer arrived in New York, everything is not exactly what she expected. Boat Head turns out to be a complete otherwise. He lives in a rotten apartment block located at a lower part of the city, and actually works as a waiter in a restaurant. The rest of his free time is mostly spent for gambling. Things get worse when Jennifer finds out Vincent has found another woman and decided to break up. Completely depressed and losing direction, Jennifer is sinking so low she hardly trying to pull herself together except waiting naively that Vincent will someday comes back for her. When Boat Head finds out about her personal problem, he decided to help her out. It doesn't take long before they finally gets close to each other but the two are yet discovered their true love are actually meant for each other since they are completely on the polar opposite.
Despite its spot-on simplicity, Alex Law's award-winning screenplay manages to make it an ordinary one into something worth cherished for. Here, he has finely tuned between typical laugh-out-loud comedy and romance drama that bloomed in a naturalistic way possible without being overly cloying. On top of that, Mabel Cheung's direction is beautifully understated while the film is greatly benefited by two great performances who are so incomparable it's really hard to think of anyone else.
This year alone, Chow Yun-Fat has been extremely versatile and further proven himself he's more than just a noble anti-hero as in both PRISON ON FIRE and CITY ON FIRE. Here he gives one of his finest performances to date in which he pulls off convincingly as an ordinary human being who just wants to live with the people he loves and do things he always dream of. Cherie Chung, in the meantime, is perfectly typecast as a naive and hopelessly romantic character. Yet their onscreen chemistry are fueled so genuine being together it feels as if they are real people in love you can easily identify with rather than some byproduct of two major stars. Only Danny Chan Bak-Keung feels more like a typical caricature for the sake of plot movement.
The award-winning cinematography by James Hayman and David Cheung is really nothing fancy but they manage to film the ugly side of the normally-beautiful state of New York into a place remains as involving and reflective as the two characters are quietly in love for each other. Then there's Lowell Lo's perfectly low-key piano score that is simple yet beautifully composed without being overly dramatic or sentimental on the other. A must-see.