Mr. Zheng - Movie Review

 

Mr. Zheng

Movie Review

  

The story of the film follows Old Zheng, played by Tumen, a widower since 2016, who visits his wife's grave and tells her that he will soon be going to a nursing home with his best friend Liang Xucheng, played by Liu Sha with whom he usually goes fishing. That night he cooked a fish meal for Liang Xuesheng's birthday. Meanwhile, a young woman named Hui, played by Wang Shen, continues to care for her husband, Lin Yu, who has been in a coma for the past three years from a car accident that she partly blames on herself. Despite her parents' pleas to let him go, she feeds and washes him dutifully, giving her hope one day when his finger twitches.

 However, she temporarily entrusts him to their care when she decides to leave for a while. One day Zhang was shocked to hear the news that Liang had died suddenly. Now largely alone, forgetful in the early stages of Alzheimer's, he remembered his wife's advice that the places you revisit are memorable, so he flew to Taiwan, which he had last visited 30 years earlier. At the only old-style song hall left in Taipei, he meets Hui by chance, who sings a song in memory of her husband. She tours the island, and after they both have dinner at a fish restaurant, she suggests they travel west together the next morning. He wants to revisit a detailed itinerary of places that ends at a pebble beach; She came to record nature sounds to help her husband wake up. Zheng says that the more time they spend together, the more she reminds him of his late wife when she was younger. But when they get lost in a forest, the two begin to question the point of their journey.

Actor Tuman, who died on December 12, 2021, at the age of 61, played his last role in Mr. Zheng.  Mr. Zheng is well acted and impeccably portrayed, but very inconsistent. The film was shot in Taiwan by a local DP Huang Qingcheng and editor senior Liao Qingzhang, this is a semi-road film in which two strangers, an elderly widow and a young semi-widow, meet by chance on their separate journeys to perpetuate the memories of their loved ones. Zou Dequan and Du Haipeng's script is a hopeless yarn, about aging, memory, piety, and more, without any form or dramatic pace.

The first half-hour separately sketches Zheng, following the sudden death of his only remaining friend and the gradual onset of Alzheimer’s, and a younger woman who’s been devotedly caring for her husband since he went into a coma three years ago. Convinced he’ll still wake up one day despite the more realistic diagnosis of her in-laws, she takes a short break to record some natural sounds to hasten his recovery.

The two meeting in an old-fashioned Taipei song hall feels more like a scripted device than a realistic encounter, as both are completely in their own shells, he is somewhat angry, and she is somewhat dreamy. But despite little help from the script, the actors themselves make the relationship more tangible, with Tumen revealing a kinder side as Zheng remembers his late wife and meets him on the same level as Wang's inflexibility. However, the film still fails to solve its central problem of involving the viewer in the story of two self-absorbed characters whose need for companionship is entirely selfish. The film's ending, which seems deliberately ambiguous, is not worth the journey. The Chinese title of the film is "Call Me Mr. Zheng".

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