What better way to mend a broken relationship than to be hurled together into the heart of an epic criminal tragedy! That’s what’s happened, anyway, to the young couple Ching and Yui. On the verge of breaking up, they’ve planned on taking a final trip together, only to find their lives upended when the boyfriend, Yui, is taken hostage by a quartet of outlaws as coldhearted as they are trigger-happy, who will go to any lengths to successfully deliver a bag stuffed with heroin. While Yui is plunged into a chaotic whirlwind of hold-ups, settling of scores and violent gunfights, his girlfriend Ching desperately seeks help. Faced with the incompetence of the police, she realizes that she’ll have to track down Yui and the crooks herself—the couple’s survival depends on it!

Earning a special mention at this year’s Hong Kong Film Critics’ Society Awards, Love Battlefield is produced by the Brilliant Idea Group, an independent company specializing in low-profile crime flicks that are nonetheless sincere, effective and without pretension. The group is behind, among others, Full Alert, The Victim, Bullets Over Summer and, in a very different vein, the touching Juliet In Love. In the tradition of those titles, somewhere between drama, romance and the post-Johnnie To police movie, Love Battlefield is a straightforward, sentimental work that mixes the aesthetic compositions of Hong Kong cinema with the social realism of China’s. An agreeable surprise, far from the glitzy baubles of Hong Kong’s tendencies these days.

—Raquel Tremblay (translated by Rupert Bottenberg)

Director: Cheang Pou-soi
Screenplay: Joe Ma
Cast: Eason Chan, Niki Chow, Kenny Kwan, Carl Ng, Qin Hailu, Wang Zhiwen
Producers: Joe Ma
Distributor: Long Shong