Starring: Yuan Yuan Gao, Wu Jiang, Yi Han Chen, Kai Zheng, Bi Ting Guo, Chen Li, Tao Liu, Zi Jian Wang.
Distributor: Other
Runtime: 127 mins. Reviewed in Apr 2015
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‘Let’s Get Married’ is based on one of China’s most popular television programs, which ought to give you some idea as to its intended audience. As a filmgoer not particularly familiar with contemporary Chinese television, I feel underqualified to critique the film, as my packed screening made it quite clear that much of the humour and romance was lost in cultural translation. However I will naturally do my objective best. I imagine fans of the series will be attending the film regardless, and those unaccustomed will not – this is perhaps for the best.
The film follows the lives of four couples who are in various states of marital distress in contemporary China. Wenwen owns a bridal boutique, and dreams of one day wearing one of the gowns created by master designer Chang down the aisle. However, her former boyfriend and best potential groom is now marrying a textbook ‘Bridezilla’. Yi Wen, a classical violinist, begins to question her own engagement to a celebrity radio host after meeting a winsome tour guide in Italy. On her solo tour abroad (which her fiancé abandoned last minute), she begins to question whether she should follow her heart or her head. Le Xiao, an airport security guard nearing the apparently cursed age of 30, tries in vain to get her pilot boyfriend to marry her. She enlists the help of her parents, but may succeed only in driving her commitment-phobic beau away. Finally, hotel manager Hai Xin and her chef husband are readying to take new jobs at a grander hotel when she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. The baby – contractually forbidden by their new contracts – complicates their move and their marriage, and just as divorce looms large over the couple, their parents move in to celebrate their 6-month anniversary, adding more turmoil to the blend.
The above plotlines operate for the most part separately from each other, never really interacting until the cliché-laden final scene. The stories are individually not particularly compelling, with the pick of the bunch following the hotelier couple falling flat with its aggressively awkward conclusion. Throughout the film, the women are portrayed as desperate for marriage, to the extent that they’ll accept not waiting for ‘the One’ in order to settle for the best option to front up and offer. It skirts a fine line between parody and misogyny, though I’m confident the filmmakers had no such intentions. This is where the cultural divide I mentioned plays a large role, and the portrayal of Chinese social expectations and customs is possibly accurate, but also just a little too removed from our own to appeal to regular audiences as another rom-com. I often found myself bewildered when my screening was collectively roaring at a one-liner which may have been subtitled poorly, but may equally have just been too culturally specific for me to pick up on. An example was the delivery of the stinger that one character’s mother was ‘even sharper than a dragon’ – my fellow viewers laughed generously, and I struggled to mount a smile.
The cast is fine, but technically the film is left a little wanting. The dialogue is often dubbed out of sync (in the original Mandarin), and the English subtitles are frequently wrong. Throw in enough sappy, insistent music to drown out any moments of emotion, and the finished product feels like an episode of a daytime soap opera which overstays its welcome at over 2 hours. The wonderful Italian locations of the violinist’s story sadly can’t salvage the whole film, though a scene taking place over a gorgeous valley is easily the funniest and best looking in the entire picture.
Those unfamiliar with the source material best stay away. Fans of the series, as I assume my fellow viewers were, will likely be pleased with the film. Cinemagoers are more than entitled to their own tastes, and this is a movie which will no doubt do nothing but enforce the necessity of those tastes.
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