SFIFF Opening Night: Perhaps Love
The opening night screening of a film festival is like having sex with a celebrity -- the experience itself is never that impressive, but it makes for a fun memory and it's nice to be able to say that you did it.
Such was our feeling at last night's opening of the San Francisco International Film Festival, which kicked off with the North American premiere of Perhaps Love. The marathon began with San Francisco Film Society Executive Director Graham Leggat's welcoming remarks, then it was on to an excessively-entouraged (no CSI to his Plumpjack, alas) Gavin Newsom, who brought up the earthquake again (we're so over the earthquake) and described Paris, France as "the Paris of the East, I mean, the Paris of the West, uh, the real Paris" as he awarded the key to the City to the Mayor of Paris (whom our companion referred as "the mayor of France", much to the amusement of our entire row of seats).
In receiving the key, Bertrand Delanoë delivered a charming sppech that used the words "freedom" and "liberty" so many times that we were reminded of that episode of Friends where Joey gives his first draft of Monica and Chandler's wedding ceremony. But we shouldn't crack wise, because even if Delanoë's English vocabularity is limited, we have to wonder if Gavin has bothered to address Parisians in their native language at all.
Then it was Legatt's turn again, where he appropriately pimped all the sponsors of the Fest before introducing Perhaps Love's director, Peter Ho-Sun Chan, whose remarks were mercifully brief.
Perhaps Love, a movie about a love triangle of filmmakers shooting a musical, evoked both the best and worst of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Moulin Rouge. It had Webber's mastery of spectacle and hooky melodic sense, and Rouge's brilliant choreography and impossibly gorgeous casting. Unfortunately, it also had Webber's cheese factor and Rouge's increasingly insane contrivances keeping the star-crossed lovers apart. And though it was only 106 minutes long, its slight story was stretched in a way that made it seem much, much longer.
That said, this is a great looking movie. Star Takeshi Kaneshiro just might be one of the best looking men alive, the cinematography by Chris Doyle and Peter Pau was breathtakingly beautiful, and the musical numbers (choreographed by Bollywood great Farah Kahn) were some of the best we've seen.
The story of a woman torn between two loves isn't getting any fresher, however, so we found ourselves restless during the less spectacular moments. In the Q&A following the film, the director announced that he "didn't believe in true love" (Strangely, this announcement got applause. San Francisco Film Society members, who broke your cold dead hearts?), which might be why the romance rang hollow for us. How can you make a movie about love, even one with as equivocating a title as Perhaps Love, without believing in it yourself?