July Rhapsody

An affecting and tender character drama, with a plot that reads like you’ve seen it too many times before: Yiu is a man going through a midlife crisis as he questions his wife’s love and his relationship with his sons, faces financial worries, and has to deal with a young student’s boldly voiced crush on him. But it rises above similarly themed films, not only in its presentation — it is spare and heartfelt where many attack real concerns in glib and superficial ways — but also in its narrative development, which is much more sophisticated than any brief summary would suggest.

It is both simple and intricate; Yiu considers his life and learns what he values in a quiet way, but the course to those truths takes him twenty years into his past, slowly revealing how history repeating has brought him to this point, and how the past he intended to forget continues to influence the present. I won’t spoil many of the details of this unfolding look backward, mostly told first by Yiu and then his wife to their eldest son, but as a narrative tool I think it perfectly substantiates his insecurities and reasons for spending time with the girl; he has become the teacher he idolized and hated, perhaps a lesser mind but a better man, and it sets up a believable kind of psychological confusion in identifying the girl with his wife, innocent and brash and pining for an older man… but this time, the girl wants him, and he’s perhaps always wondered if his wife ever did. This aspect is quite cleverly realized and not laid on too heavily — despite the complicated narrative it still gives the effect of simplicity.

I would perhaps say that it is this lovely story that makes the film so moving, and there is not much compelling cinema in it (performances are very good, though); I could as easily been satisfied with the material as a novella. But that’s hardly a knock on such a compelling, deeply human film.