In 2010’s Love in a Puff, Pang Ho-cheung delivered a lively take on the beginnings of a relationship, spicing up the story with distinctly local humour and shooting with a refreshingly natural style. Many of that film’s plusses are present in the follow-up picture Love in the Buff too, only this time the action moves from Hong Kong to Beijing and Pang ups the ante for full-on romance cinema. Characters from the first instalment return and are fleshed out, but, with a wider audience now being tapped across mainland China and beyond, moviegoers who are new to the characters need not worry: Love in the Buff stands comfortably on its own as a charming pop cinema confection.
The action picks up several months into the relationship between salesgirl Cherie Yu (Miriam Yeung) and ad man Jimmy Cheung (Shawn Yue). Viewers first find the pair living together, but the partnership turns sour when Jimmy forgets his mother-in-law’s birthday dinner. After a break-up, Jimmy accepts an advertising job in Beijing and heads north, picking up a local stewardess (Mini Yang) on his first day there. But when Cherie’s cosmetics company decides to give up on Hong Kong, she too is transferred to the mainland for work. Cherie eventually finds herself trying out an ultra-nice-guy businessman (Xu Sheng) as a new lover, but she can’t let go of the previous relationship. And neither, it seems, can Jimmy after he and Cherie have a chance encounter on the street.
With the principal location changed and the production benefiting from a better shooting schedule and budget, Love in the Buff channels the best of its predecessor and aims for mass market appeal, complete with tear-jerker set pieces and moments of uproarious comedy. The scope of Jason Kwan’s loose and light cinematography, once again a joy to watch, expands to take in wider urban and countryside vistas, and the score by Alan Wong and Janet Yung carefully extends Love in a Puff’s musical contributions.
Comedy in the film this time caters comfortably to audiences in Hong Kong and mainland China: extended cameos by Huang Xiaoming and Ekin Cheng add pop culture gags for both sets of viewers, for instance, while wordplay and slang add extra layers. (In one slang-related moment, a casual term for a girlfriend — translating as “vegetable” — is referenced visually with two men sharing some greens.) Hong Kong filmmakers have struggled with satisfying the distinct audiences at home and in the mainland, and Pang appears to be hitting the right notes. Universal comedy also gets a strong run, from a bizarre side story inserted before the film truly gets under way, to a sleazy airplane gag and an absurd end-credits karaoke spoof.
The story’s relocations to Beijing meanwhile reflect current Hong Kong-mainland cultural shifts and the changing movements of Hongkongers as new opportunities rise — issues brought up early in the piece by Jimmy’s boss (Jim Chim), who gloats about the merits of shifting to the capital to live and work. Pang himself moved to Beijing with his wife after Love in a Puff came out, and stories in this new film in part mirror his own experiences.
In reprising their roles, Miriam Yeung and Shawn Yue share ups and downs onscreen with a great chemistry carried over from their earlier film. Side characters from the first instalment also turn up again, most notably Cherie’s pal Brenda (June Lam), who was saddled with ridicule in the earlier film but this time finds a lover in a spectacular stroke of luck. Brenda’s story is among several contrasts in the love stakes — her perfect pickup coming amid the fumbles and failures others may experience. That all is not rosy in the love stakes is no surprise given the darker twists and turns that find a place in Pang’s cinematic world. But with feel-good filmmaking not in short supply in Love in the Buff, Pang ensures there’s still plenty of material to seduce mainstream moviegoers with ease.
Tim Youngs