`Sophie` a highlight reel for Zhang

"Sophie`s Revenge" is not really a film. It is a collection of montages designed to place Zhang Ziyi`s assets on display adorning a variety of fashionable clothes while showcasing her acting chops in situational comedy.

No doubt, producers will be knocking on her door after this film with offers of roles that will give her even more opportunities to act bubbly on-screen.

She is the only saving grace in this rudderless effort that is riddled with cliches and overacting, and too cute for its own good.

As a highlight reel for its vivacious star, which is exactly what her management camp probably wanted, the film works quite well.

For most of her career, Zhang has portrayed strong women with a stubborn nature that perfectly befitted her seemingly cold facade.



Her role in the film is a far cry from the roles she has become famous for in such films as "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Memoirs of a Geisha." No doubt, that was why she took on the role of Sophie, a frumpy, neurotic, socially awkward career woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

The film also stars popular Korean television and film heartthrob So Ji-sub, an otherwise competent actor who showed considerable range in last year`s critically-acclaimed sleeper hit "Rough Cut." Here, though, the 31-year-old So is as wooden and inanimate as a bar stool. This cannot be blamed on him, as his cardboard cut-out of a character leaves him little to work with.

Zhang plays Sophie, a popular Chinese comic book artist and author who vows revenge after her groom-to-be surgeon, Jeff (played by So) leaves her for a famous actress the day before their wedding.

The other woman is played by Fan Bingbing - China`s most popular actress in real life - and is a spoiled brat who clings to Jeff everywhere he goes.

Characters established, the film then becomes a series of silly situational sketches that fail to mold a cohesive narrative.

By the film`s end, all characters involved remain relegated to archetypes whose characters can be summarized in a phrase or two. There`s the jilted lover, her philandering beau and the free-spirited man the heroine eventually falls in love with.

We really don`t know how Sophie and Gordon, the other leading man played by popular Taiwanese singer-actor Yao Chen, fall in love.

We only know that they`ve spent time together through a series of vacuous montages of the two doing things that the romantic comedy formula requires them to do.

The film also includes the obligatory "Pretty Woman" sequence where Sophie is seen trying on different outfits at a department store to the tune of a Chinese cover of a popular Korean pop song while her man watches.

The film`s first-time director Eva Jin seems hell bent on proving to the viewers that Beijing is a lot like London or Manhattan. She overuses sets through gaudy art direction far detached from reality and stays away from filming busy streets to avoid reminding us that this is China.

We all know that country is on the fast track towards prosperity, but locals who watch the film will no doubt ask themselves where the heck it was filmed.

Had the film`s aim been set in an otherworldly universe like the French film "Amelie," the fantasy aesthetic might have been appropriate.

But romantic comedies, however far from reality they usually are, must still be set in environments we can easily identify. Here the lack of realism becomes a distraction. This might be due to the fact that the director`s previous job was tied to the comic book world, which also explains why the film is just a collection of situations, rather than a movie with a beginning, middle and end.

(kws@heraldm.com)



By Song Woong-ki