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The most charming artifice of the film is the staging of Maggie Cheung who plays Emily Wang, a drug addict endeavouring to refresh her life after the death of her husband upon overdose of heroin. The thematic substances are change upon contextual circumstances, refreshment of life, the endeavours in pursuing so and the patriarchal benevolence of forgiveness and sympathy. The presence of Maggie's father-in-law (Nick Nolte) arises from a compositional motivation in the diegesis and serves as leverage in transforming Maggie's life into a new one. The story progression is rather slow with a futility of some minutiae subplots.

However, director Olivier Assayas uses hand-held camera, fast cutting on most sequences and intensively exploits swish pans (mostly on match of action) to visually compartmentalize the sense of Emily's psychological instability and loss of direction into the narrative. This virtuosic framing resembles the style of documentary films. The instability is further reinforced in narrative by covering a multiplicity of locales: London, Paris, Vancouver, Ontario and San Francisco across the northern hemisphere. Other cinematographic properties include obscure framing and mirror reflection, which nevertheless implicitly supplements a rendition of narrative.

The trilingual (English, French and some Cantonese) staging of Maggie Cheung is excellent. Yet the only stigma of her staging is that her singing spoils her performance. Smoking scenes and the repeated foul language from a number of characters are under realistic motivation to portray the stale life of Maggie's social circle. It is a shortcoming that the relationships between Emily and her son are not intensively explored to replace some superfluous side-plots at the beginning of the film. The film is open ended. In a nutshell, those who like the staging of Maggie Cheung would not be dissatisfied. For those who are eager to watch a classical movie of behavioural recovery from deep tragedy or delicate depiction of behavioural transformation, however, would be disappointed by the diegesis.

註：本評論純屬影評作者個人意見，並不代表本網立場。
Note: This views presented in this review is solely the views of the critic who wrote it and do not represent the stance of our website.

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