Love Story in London 岁月忽已暮

All posters ²

Screenplay: 5.0

Acting: 7.0

Visual side: 7.0

Music: 6.0

Overall rating: 5.0

Up until her senior year of high school, Jiang He (Wendy Zhang Zi-Feng) was just like everyone else — an average student who wanted nothing and aspired to nothing. But when the local heartthrob and top student Jiang Hai (Song Wei-Long) smiles at her, Jiang He decides she must become his equal for him to notice her. Years pass, Jiang He achieves success and, together with Jiang Hai, gets into Cambridge, but back in her hometown she leaves behind her childhood friend Gu Xinle (Jo Jiang Chao), who is in love with her…

For people who are more or less interested in cinema beyond the level of “let’s see what’s showing,” there is a whole set of alarming markers when it comes to films, and Love Story in London has collected two of them at once. First, it entered production back in 2016 and with great fanfare – based on a popular novel, the project was actively hyped online, but in early 2017 it vanished completely from the radar, only to resurface in 2021 and already as a film for streaming platforms. Considering that this is not an expensive effects-driven blockbuster requiring complex post-production and months of work on computer graphics, this is a very suspicious warning sign. The picture also came out under two different titles, which likewise bodes nothing good – usually this simple trick is used to at least slightly “reset” a project that has accumulated negative word of mouth.

Nevertheless, after watching, the questions that arise remain unanswered – why the film was held back so long is unclear, because despite a number of serious problems, purely technically this is far from the worst cinema and would certainly have found its audience five years ago too. The “teen melodrama” genre is very popular in China, and at a glance everything in Love Story in London is done as it should be – there is a sentimental plot, charming actors, and a glamorous look. But dig a little deeper and a whole heap of flaws emerges that seriously spoil the pleasure of watching.

First, the film’s characters live in an implausible world of triumphant glamour. By all indications the main characters are hardly the children of wealthy businessmen, yet they have no money problems, they live in large spacious houses, and a sudden trip from a small Chinese seaside town to London for one of them, if it poses any problems at all, is certainly not of a financial kind. At the same time we are asked to believe they are “ordinary folk,” and Jiang He is even forced to work in the kitchen of a small London restaurant, scraping garbage out of clogged drains. One would like to think this is the heavy legacy of Hong Kong rom-coms of the 2000s – the film’s director, Janet Chun, began her career there with the faceless “glamour” of La Lingerie.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg; in its core content, Love Story in London is so detached from the real world that “Twilight” against it would seem like an investigative documentary. Once again we have the configuration of “two handsome men in love with a small, unremarkable girl,” once again she behaves like a heartless idiot and a complete egoist, once again the guys have been left without even the slightest hint of a personality, retaining only blind devotion to their “muse.” Jiang He suffers now over one, now over the other, yet she inspires only one desire – for someone to knock some sense into her, forcing her to see something beyond her own nose.

The target audience for such films is teenage girls who have no experience whatsoever but a cartload and a little wheelbarrow of fantasies, expectations, and demands regarding the opposite sex, and such films do not help them sort any of it out, but merely add even more illusions. It is clear that these are complaints of roughly the same order as complaints about porn films, in which women are depicted as obliging and always ready for anything, but the conventionality of porn is obvious. Unlike what we see here.