The romance feels real in Only You

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      Starring Tang Wei. In Mandarin, English, and Italian, with English subtitles. Rated G.

      The title and story are taken from a 1994 flick intended to revive director Norman Jewison’s career and kick Marisa Tomei’s into high gear. It didn’t work out that way, but Robert Downey Jr. did get to play a convincing romantic lead.

      Adapted and directed by Zhang Hao, this Chinese-language remake enhances the reputation of its leads. The focus is initially on Fang Yuan (Tang Wei), a veterinarian engaged to a dull dentist we never really meet.

      Years earlier, a fortuneteller foretold her eventual union with a perfect man called Song Kunming. When a fellow by that name calls her apartment from Italy, looking for the fiancée, she immediately drops everything to fly off to Milan. Fang brings her slightly older, considerably more married friend, Li Xiatong (Su Yan), to kibitz her through increasingly confused situations.

      On their first night in Italy, the women run into the Beijing version of a Brooklyn hipster, a transplanted antique dealer played by versatile Liao Fan. The guy is actually named Feng Dali, but he somehow passes himself off as Song Kunming. Feng comes clean almost as soon as our sad-eyed ingénue falls for him, but it’s too late: the rom-com battle is on!

      The conventions are creaky in the original, but what’s striking in this two-hour version, aside from the postcard views of Milan, Florence, and other gorgeous locations, is the director’s surprisingly frank depiction of male-female role-playing, circa 2015. When the comedy stops, the romance feels real.

      Comments

      1 Comments

      Kalr Marl

      Jul 24, 2015 at 1:02pm

      Tang Wei is dreamy.