Lim Kah-wai's cooperation with Freddie Wong as producer and co-writer resulted in the latter's most expensive and most mainstream production, one that truly stands out in the former's filmography.
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On the eve of her wedding anniversary, Hong Kong star actress Wen Menglin decides to fly to Shanghai, in order to surprise her husband, an art dealer, particularly since their busy schedules seem to leave very little time for them to be together lately. However, when she arrives in his flat, and after a rather strange “interaction” with the taxi driver, she is unpleasantly surprised to see another woman there, Cindy, his secretary. Although nothing inappropriate seems to be going on, she cannot get over her feelings of jealousy, and after him denying to go with her to Guilin, Guanxi province, 1,600 km away, where they spent their honeymoon ten years ago, she decides to go on her own. Her driver for the trip is the same one, Han Lei, who turns out to be an aspiring writer. The several days-trip brings a number of situations, as the two of them start to bond. Meanwhile, Wen Menglin's associates and the press is looking for her, as she was about to shoot a movie, and soon the same happens with her husband.
Lim Kah-wai directs a film that is split in two distinct axes. The first one revolves around the declining relationship of two middle-aged individuals, whose jobs and lack of communication has created a number of issues on their relationship, with the film also exploring how different their past was, through a number of flashbacks. The second part follows the “rules” of the road movie, with Wen Menglin and Han Lei experiencing a number of episodes, as they begin to get to know, and in the process, heal each other.
The most significant issue with the film is that the two axes are rather imbalanced. Although both of them seem to serve as vehicles of promoting Wen Bixia as Wen Menglin, with her looking impressive in the plethora of different dresses she wears throughout the film, the first part suffers from mediocre acting, particularly from Tan Yaowen as Huang Jiahui, and a rather clichéd narrative that eventually lingers towards the melodramatic.
On the other hand, the road trip part is excellent. Headed by a great performance by Zhao Bingrui as Han Lei and an impressive antithetical chemistry with Wen Bixia, this part actually works on a number of levels. The episodical nature is quite entertaining with a number of sequences being particularly funny (the wedding) and others particularly beautiful (the one by the water). And talking about beauty, Zhong Youtian's cinematography captures the melancholic beauty of the autumnal, bucolic settings with realism and artistry, highlighting the rural China in the most impressive way, with the red, yellow and orange hues dominating the many images. At the same time, the dialogues in this part are rather meaningful, as both characters open up and help each other at the same time, trying to mend their issues that mostly derive from their pasts. At moments, it seems that something more than friendship is in the air, but the script does not explore that part particularly.
“Love in Late Autumn” is an impressively-looking production that would be much better however, if the focus was solely on the road trip part and the overall relationship between “the movie star and the taxi driver”.
