The 25th anniversary New York Asian Film Festival takes place from July 10th to July 26th. For details and showtime, click here.
I think that perhaps at this point my take on what constitutes a successful romantic comedy echoes the infamous sentiment of one Potter Stewart: I’ll know it when I see it. Though maybe I’m being disingenuous and it’s actually a little easier than that for me to parse: I like them when the chemistry is there and it seems like you’re watching a genuine human connection unfold, and I like it significantly less when it’s a contrived compendium of stock characters and cliche situations that doesn’t even have the decency to provide genuine comedy.
You have two jobs and I’m willing to grade on a curve if you only get it half-right. But it’s downright demoralizing how frequently filmmakers can’t even manage that.
Crossing A Dawn, then, proves itself to be an interesting anomaly. The characters, it could be argued, are a bit stock and the situations (one in particular) occasionally beggar belief… but that one cliched situation is arguably one of the highlights of the film
Sometimes you simply have to throw out your sense of understanding and acknowledge when a thing is working. And explore the possibility that you are simply not that deep, and can be seduced by a genre you’re ambivalent to at best if the main characters are hot enough. And if there’s anything we can say about this movie to a certainty, it’s main characters ARE in fact unspeakably hot.
Still… hotness aside, I can’t in all honesty say I was on board immediately. This is a very youthful, very modern take on the romantic comedy and as such the film initially presents as extremely online in a way that may or may not be accurate to today’s society but in some ways already felt like it might be a bit outdated on that score. Luckily the film locks into place once our hero and heroin actually meet and the tech stuff starts to fade into background noise.
Xu Qui (Sandra Ma), residential designer and self-described “Beijing Hukou” (essentially a registered permanent resident) has a meet cute with Yuzhou (Edward Chen), a hunky writer who she initially mistakes for her date from the apps. When her real date shows up and is not as advertised Xu Qui runs off with Yuzhou instead. The chemistry is immediate and palpable, and before long they’re on the lookout for a place they can act on their sinful urges. Neither of their actual residences will work; Yuzhou claims to live with his mother and the clearly commitment-phobic Xu Qui considers having people over a yard too far, intimacy wise. And so the hunt is om. but where Xu Qui is (in her own words) “thirsty but not easy” and Yuzhou is a man with a romantic streak roughly as obvious as his 50-pack abs, there’s more than just the tension of ‘will they actually manage to knock boots?’ In the air… to say nothing of the clock occasionally popping up in the corner of the screen. A less-than-subtle clue that, in ways neither could possibly anticipate, time might not be on their side.
And that’s the movie in a nutshell: two unspeakably hot people spending a very long night bonding while trying to bang. And if you ask me, it’s high time we had an answer to that longheld but never fully answered question: what if Before Sunrise was Horny on Main?
(For the record, the film does in fact name check both Before Sunrise and Chunking Express. In this, as well as many other ways I will leave to future viewers to discover, the film is a lot smarter than the average romantic comedy. And several of the above average ones)
It goes without saying that a film of this nature lives or dies on the chemistry of its stars, and once again I cannot stress enough how appealing Sandra Ma and Edward Chen are, sheerly as visual objects. But being young and sexy is really only half the equation; how many times before in film have we seen two really hot individuals come together and fail to generate any actual heat?
Too many, I reckon.
Not so here, and while part of that is that Ma and Chen both have screen presence as individuals and chemistry as a duom I do think the structure of the film helps quite a bit. The one night, essentially real-time structure really gives you no place to hide performance wise. You can’t take refuge in the folds of a montage to simulate bonding; you’re forced to make the audience feel it, not just fill in the gaps for themselves. Writer/director Zhou Badou provides dialogue that’s clever but grounded enough to feel real and Ma invests her character, a somewhat cliche modern good time gal with a certain playfulness and self-awareness that soften her rougher edges. The depths and contradictions that make her interesting are under the surface from the start, even when she’s at her most affected and shallow in her opening moments. Chen, for his part, is equally playful but also sensitive and reserved and internal in ways that could have easily gone wrong in less adept hands.
The film itself remains small and intimate throughout, never straying from our leads and only interrupting their banter for brief encounters with other lovelorn souls, each one making their own specific case for the ephemeral nature of love and desire. Most of these are pleasing in their fleeting melancholy, but one extended sequence in particular (as mentioned roughly 200 paragraphs ago), proved to be both the most contrived and the most interesting expression of the idea as out of a population of 21.8 million Beijing residents, Xu Qui just happens to run into a former one night stand (Song Yang) who in turn just happens to be mansion-sitting with his latest fling (Zhang YiFan, stealing scenes left and right)
In conception it’s the hokiest of hokey plot turns. But the entire sequence soars, thanks to the performances of Yang and YiFan and the masterful way they play off of Ma and Chen in every conceivable configuration. It’s a pas de quatre that leaves everyone involved changed and kicks off the final third where some hidden truths reveal themselves and the movie reveals itself to have way more on its mind than just sex and romance. It has thoughts about what having a home truly means and how easy it is to run from one’s self in an age of technology, and even how and why the stories we tell both ourselves and others matter.
And maybe, in the end, that’s why Crossing A Dawn worked so well for me where so many romantic comedies fail utterly. Most romantic comedies are about the magic of love, but Dawn ultimately about so much more than just love. It’s about life itself, and how to live it. Which, yes, does sound cheesy. I know that. Cheese is hard to avoid in any movie that traffics in love and romance, because the vulnerability required to truly love and truly live run that exact risk.
And when you take on that sort of challenge, it helps to have unspeakably hot actors to look at. It’s kind of win-win, honestly.
