13th Spring Festival: Epic scale weighs down A Tale of Three Cities

One of the film selections in this year’s 13^th Spring Film Festival is the period romance A Tale of Three Cities from 2015 directed by Mabel Cheung. This sprawling epic tells the love story of Charles and Lee-Lee Chan, parents of action superstar Jackie Chan.

Starring Ching Wan Lau as Fang Daolong (Charles Chan) and Wei Tang as Chen Yuerong (Lee-Lee Chan), this movie heavily reminded me of David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago wherein the horrors of the war/revolution also took its toll on the love affair of the protagonists.

Probably to avoid offending Jackie Chan who was reported to have cried and cried upon seeing the film, Daolong and Yuerong’s story appeared to have been greatly romanticized. What was left are lead characters whose edges have been dulled to the point of being too sentimental and saccharine. And these edges were instead given to the supporting pair of Hailu Qin as the street smart Qiu and Boran Jing as the mysterious intellectual Hua. These characters were more intriguing but their side stories that also included a love story of their own served as an unnecessary distraction from the main love story.

  

A Tale of Three Cities was meant to be a sweeping epic, a moving story of love’s triumph despite the turbulence of war. But the ambitious scale that spans decades and three cities came at the expense of well rounded characters. Without fully realized and truly engaging characters, it was hard to feel the way that Jackie Chan did while sitting through this movie. Stretched to over two hours due protracted storytelling, the film still left some questions unanswered like what happened to Daolong’s sons. The separations and eventual reunions felt repetitive and the coincidences were too forced to be believable.

Catch A Tale of Three Cities and five other Chinese films at the 13^th Spring Film Festival running up to February 5, 2019 at the Shangri-La Plaza’s Red Carpet.