Tin seung yan gaan (Nelson Yu Lik-wai, 1999)

[sidehacker]

...aka Love Will Tear Us Apart.

Has anyone seen this? It looks like the sort of the thing I'd love; it's directed by Nelson Yu Lik-Wai, the guy who does the cinematography for Jia Zhang-Ke's films, it starts Tony Leung, it's named after a Joy Divison song. So yeah, everything about it seems really great.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

The main things I remember about it: the striking cinemtaography (which looks quite a bit different from Yu's work with Jia) and the relentlessly measured tone of the whole thing, which is of course the entire point. (The characters are so zombified for the most part that the few moments of levity and warmth are all the more memorable for it.) It doesn't really work on a conventional "narrative" level -- motivations are pretty hazy, for one thing -- but it works pretty well as a sort of "tone poem." (And don't go putting much stock in the appropriated English title, which seems a bit too melodramatic for what actually happens in the film.) I saw it on imported HK DVD, which looked decent enough; what I really want to find is Yu's follow-up, All Tomorrow's Parties, which seems to have dropped off the face of the earth (although Pat Graham recently wrote some favorable words).