Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai make a strong return to upscale romantic comedy in Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, this time setting their sights on pleasing crowds not just at home but across mainland China’s multiplex scene too. With To handling producer-director duties and Wai co-producing and co-writing, the picture largely plays out in workplace settings, as their landmark hit Needing You... did in 2000, and picks up where the filmmakers’ popular line of rom-com fare left off in the early 2000s.
Despite the title, right from the start there’s someone who’s been nursing a broken heart: stock analyst Zixin (Gao Yuanyuan), a Suzhou native working in the Hong Kong CBD, bumps into her ex and his new woman and a confrontation ensues. Little does Zixin know that high-flying investment banker Shen-ran (Louis Koo) already has eyes for her right then and there. As it happens, Shen-ran’s office building is just across from Zixin’s, and the pair strike up a form of communication through the windows.
But Zixin also gets to know a boozing, hard-up architect named Qihong (Daniel Wu), and soon a double whammy of failures — first a flubbed attempt at dating, then the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the subsequent financial turmoil — drives the would-be love triangle apart. It’s not until three years later that the three cross paths again, and nice-guy Qihong and hotheaded Shen-ran have another shot at winning over Zixin for good.
While Don’t Go Breaking My Heart represents To and Wai’s first serious attempt to woo large audiences in mainland China, don’t take that to mean the pair are simply mining the riches of their past rom-com successes and putting them on repeat for a new crowd. While occasional parallels with To and Wai’s past work in pop romance are evident, the pair try out an entirely new look and feel for the genre. Scenes of the workplaces are impeccably shot and precisely staged, the guy vs. guy rivalry occasionally evokes thriller material, and there’s even an update of three-way standoff imagery worked into the office landscape.
Director To also gets plenty of mileage out of creating fish-tank-like visuals of people observed through expanses of glazing, giving rise to silent and creative connections and smart gags. And Wai and his team’s writing injects oddball and cosmic touches (what’s up with the pet frog?) while keeping viewers involved and guessing about the relationships unfolding in Hong Kong and Suzhou.
Casting a mainland actress may have been necessary simply for co-production reasons, but the role of Zixin makes perfect sense in a modern Hong Kong context, now that Mandarin-speaking Chinese professionals are a regular part of the city’s business districts. Gao Yuanyuan (City of Life and Death) isn’t a name in romantic comedy, but here she’s totally charming from the first scenes of her getting around town. As battling suitors Louis Koo and Daniel Wu make a great pair, too, with Koo especially cutting loose with both comic and hard-edged scenes.
So far, the filmmakers’ renewed approach to hitmaking is paying off. When Don’t Go Breaking My Heart opened in China and Hong Kong at the end of March, it quickly rose in the charts: in the mainland it held the No. 1 spot early in its release, and in Hong Kong it was the top film for a fortnight. To and Wai already have two more projects on the go this year in their second coming in romantic comedies. If this picture is merely testing the waters for entertaining mass audiences in both mainland China and Hong Kong, let’s see what more To and Wai can do when they can once again swim full speed in the mainstream.
Tim Youngs