A Beautiful Life

Had Douglas Sirk been Chinese, he might have made films like this beautifully shot, melodramatic love story set in Beijing, featuring an implausible couple at its center. Fang (Liu Ye) is a sad-sack cop, and Li (Shu Qi) is a high-living Hong Kong girl who has come to the capital to strike it rich in real estate. After meeting cute in a bar, the pair grow close despite their differences; but after Fang is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, he decides to go off by himself. However, Li tracks him down, and the couple wed and have a child—only to suffer a tragic reversal when Fang is attacked by a thief he's chasing and winds up lying in a hospital near death. As if this weren't maudlin enough, A Beautiful Life features subplots involving a blind buddy of Fang's, and the cop's autistic brother, who falls in love with a mute girl. The back-and-forth between uplift and woe makes this an eventful Life, if also one that feels very much like a Warner Bros. weepie from the 1940s. Still, the cast plays with conviction, and director Andrew Lau—best known for Infernal Affairs, the inspiration for Martin Scorsese's The Departed—sets the scenes in vibrant locations. A Beautiful Life is essentially soap opera, but the exotic flavor makes it somewhat palatable, despite the manipulative and borderline absurd plot. A strong optional purchase. (F. Swietek)