Amidst wedding preparations, the career of renowned TV anchor Li-mei (Yu-Wei Shao) takes a big leap. Due to the success of a well-staged interview with the country’s president, her show shoots to the top of the charts. But things don’t run that smoothly at home. Instead of living a blissful pre-marital life, the couple drifts apart. Li-mei avoids physical contact with her fiancé Tai-wei (Figaro Tseng) who, on top of everything else that is wrong with their relationship, gets annoyed by the unannounced visits by his father-in-law-to-be Chih-te Huang (Mark Lee). Very close to his daughter, the old man has the spare key to the apartment and uses it whenever he feels like it without thinking that this would disturb someone.
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In her sophomore feature-length film (and first non-animated) “Lost In Perfection” for which she also penned the script, the Taiwanese helmer Hsin Yin Sung builds an intricate patchwork of different crimes committed by different perpetrators for personal gain. The two main characters are strong women challenged by heavy manipulations, dirty political games, betrayal, and personal crises. The central crime that ignites a chain reaction of other unfortunate events remains unsolved until the very end, leaving space for interpretations.
Sung was inspired by a true story about the Japanese relationship fraudster turned serial killer Kijima Kanae, who wasn’t a woman who turned heads but was highly successful with men. She poisoned three would-be husbands but was suspected of killing many more men, cashing up on their life insurances or bleeding their accounts dry post-mortem. In the movie, it is not that clear if the woman accused of the murders is the one who committed them.
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Hsiu-lan Ho (Mei-Hsiu Lin), who is publicly body shamed and called an “unattractive femme fatale”, is a rare beast. Unbothered by what people say or think about her, she is honest about her past and unapologetic about her lifestyle. This seems to bother everybody except her past lover and her present partner who jump to her defense as soon as the scandal breaks out. One even hurries in his own death to prove everyone wrong.
We are fooled into believing many things in the course of the film’s two-hour runtime, and that is something that you don’t get often. “Lost in Perfection” is a noir that manages to deliver a couple of surprises and interesting twists. The cast ensemble is outstanding, and there isn’t a role played half-heartedly. One would think that two complicated romances are more than enough, but who are we to judge anyone who falls for a public persecutor who looks like (=is) Rhydian Vaughan? The Welsh-Taiwanese actor does his best to charm us and then crush our hearts as a double-faced douchebag.
Relationship drama will stop preoccupying Le-mei who is alerted at her father’s sudden wish to marry a woman she has previously never heard of. The red flags fly almost immediately when she realizes that the woman in question is her neighbour Hsiu-lan Ho who’s half Chih-te’s age. However, the real reason to worry starts when her name appears in connection with an unsolved case involving a man who was found dead in his car. The man’s apparent suicide is declared as murder by the police in order to distract the public’s attention from much bigger problems. She invests all her energy to rescue her father from the monster’s claws.
Two hours might sound long, but the film is finely paced and the time passes fast due to the script’s attention to detail and small subplots that enrich the story. For instance, we are not just watching a Taiwanese noir based on a horrendous true crime story. “Lost In Perfection”, formerly called “Love is A Bitch” but luckily renamed on time before its Netflix release, criticizes the power of media over our lives, and its manipulative, destructive, and stalking nature. The film also speaks of estrangement and the importance of talking about emotions and problems with partners and family members and doesn’t forget to remind us that there are bigger criminals out there who never get caught.
