A quintet of vignettes on love and marriage linked by a young' couple's passage to the altar, Spicy Love Soupis a highly assured debut by 30-year-old director Zhang Yang that should prove palatable to occidental tastes if festivals programmers put it in their menus. Contempo urban pic - sans peasants, politics or palanquins - proved China can now field well-directed, accessible fare beyond the artier stuff that dominates the major fests.
Interspersed by lightly comic scenes tracing the romance and marriage of a young Beijing couple (Wang Xuebing, Liu Jie), first seen dining on a spicy hotpot in the shape of the yin-yang symbol, the various tales are varied in flavor and tone.
Despite its rather sappy English title, pic never reaches down to purely commercial levels in either acting or directing. Zhang's helming is always carefully controlled without becoming overly arty, lensing is bright and sharp, direct sound recording a major enhancer of performances, and the tempo of each segmento adjusted to its subject matter, which builds into a broad portrait of modern Beijing mores.
Tech credits are top-drawer on the $200,000 budget - much of which came from Taiwanese sources, marshaled by co-exec producer Peter Loehr, a China-based American - and a selection of mainland and Taiwanese pop songs jollies
things along without becoming MTV-ish. (Pic was the first to merit a simultaneous soundtrack release in China.)
Derek Elley