Reviews
Zui mei li (2012)
Illogic Ruins Otherwise Believable Acting
Director Xiang Xiu Qiong begins AN INNOCENT MISTAKE with three close female friends who discover an abandoned baby girl with a note attached to her blanket saying she could no longer care for her child. This abandoned child series begins a host of mistakes that cover the next eighteen years and sixteen episodes. There are so many errors in judgment by every one of the cast that a wave of mistakes become the motife of the series. The baby is Man Qing (Mathilde Lin) who is given unconditional love by her trio of mothers. All three mothers work as hostesses in a sleazy bar where nightly they have to sing and dance for mostly male customers. All three refuse to engage in prostitution so in their own minds they retain their self respect. The first mother is Man Yu (Xan Man Ning) who is the wisest of the three. It is she who keeps the other two as decent hardworking women. The second is Qing Xia (Lin Mei Xia) a chubby and unattractive woman who has accepted her fate that she will never marry and her only goal is to provide a loving home for Man Qing. The third is Chu Hong (Kelly Huang) a beautiful woman who knows all she has to offer a man is her body as she is more easygoing than intelligent.
When Man Qing turns eighteen she wishes to go to college but one of her classmates Wei Wei (Kathy Chen) fabricates a false charge of thievery so that Man Qing believes she must resign from school in disgrace. Her mistake here is her refusal to refute the charges since the accuser is a popular Mean Girl type. The series goes off track when inexplicably she falls in love with a forty-five year old married man Da Shan (Jason Wang) whose son Yu En (Mo Tzu Yi) coincidentally falls in love with her. Complicating matters is that Wei Wei falls in love with Yu En thereby setting off a continuing conflict between the two. Then there is the Da Shan's wife Yu Jun Hui (Joy Pan) who learns of Man Qing's attraction to her husband and tries to deflect Man Qing into dating Yu En. With all these competing and crisscrossing romantic entanglements, the plot devolves into a totally unexpected late series complication which I shall not here reveal that tries mightily but fails to untangle the Gordian knot of continuous mistakes of all concerned. The chief problem with character exposition lies in Man Qing's ongoing failure to account for her choice of a man. Should she choose Da Shan whom she clearly loves but no one supports her choice or should she choose Yu En whom everyone agrees would be her logical choice. Credibility takes a final hit when the ending turns into the Taiwanese stereotypical finale of mass marriages for a forced happy ending. In AN INNOCENT MISTAKE the wrong choices are neither innocent nor mistakes but emerge as hard boiled but illogical preferences that prevent the viewer from accepting this series as a believable domestic sequence of affairs gone awry.
The Last Detective: Tricia (2003)
A Promising Series
THE LAST DETECTIVE is a British police drama that manages to combine gritty drama with a surprisingly deft comedic touch. Peter Davison is known derogatorily as Dangerous Davies, a detective who is purposively undangerous in intent but the vagaries of each episode seem determined to entrap him in unwanted peril. In "Tricia" the third episode of the series, we already have the essentials, DC Davies is low man on the police totem pole. His boss refuses to give him any case other than the worst ones, none wanted by Davies' peers. Tricia (Eleanor David) was robbed in her flat by two intruders whom she cannot identify as they pushed her face down on her floor and kept her there. She goes to the police who quickly decide that her case is unsolvable. Guess who gets this loser? Davies does who tries hard to be kind and understanding to one who has been victimized twice, once by the perps and again by what she sees as an uncaring constabulary. The tone of the episode begins lightly but by the second half, it switches to a jarring suspense caused by a more than slightly crazed paranoid who brings to mind Glen Close from FATAL ATTRACTION. The viewer easily sympathizes with DC Davies as he seeks only to maintain his own equilibrium in a job that demands disequilibrium from all officers concerned. THE LAST DETECTIVE promises to be eminently watchable.
Born to Love (1931)
Melodramatic But Effective
In BORN TO LOVE, Constance Bennett (Doris) and Joel McRea (Barry) are lovers who meet during the last weeks of the First World War. London is portrayed as a city in imminent danger of bombs from aircraft. They meet and predictably fall in love despite the chaos and confusion that surround them. There is an interesting scene in which they make love, one that is prudishly suggested off screen, yet one that in just a few years would have been banned by Hollywood as overtly salacious. The plot is the contrived package of Barry's reported death, forcing Doris to marry another. The second half of the film is less melodramatic and more of an acerbic commentary on the harshness of an English divorce system that allows a rich and titled husband to retain custody of a child over the wishes of a impecunious mother. There is an encoded ideology in the film that does not hide the fact that poor women who marry titled men can expect no mercy or kindness from a patriarchal legal system. BORN TO LOVE nevertheless carries the audience to a satisfying if not predictable conclusion of the need for true love to triumph over formidable societal obstacles.