Review | Love Lies movie review: Sandra Ng, Michael Cheung in online dating scam comedy drama
Ng plays an emotionally stunted doctor who falls prey to an online dating scam in a film with a profound message hidden beneath its comedy
3/5 stars
An online dating scam takes on a life of its own in Love Lies, a fitfully melancholy, often amusing look at romance, deception and human nature that draws us in with its thought-provoking premise but struggles to realise the full potential of its ingenious set-up.
When we first meet her, Yu is being questioned by police as a fraud victim. Curiously, she refuses to press charges despite having lost a huge sum of money, instead insisting that she has fully enjoyed her virtual romance with a middle-aged French engineer and widower she met on a dating app.
Love Lies poses two fascinating questions: why would an intelligent woman like Yu fall prey to the obvious traps set by Lee and his peers – and still come out to defend the perpetrators? And what happens if the swindler begins to empathise with, and perhaps fall for, his target against all reason?
The first is delicately aided by Ng’s dramatic acting, although she is ill served by first-time filmmaker Ho Miu-ki and her co-writer Chan Hing-ka’s decision to treat the scam as light comedy. Once the gullible Yu is inadvertently made the butt of the joke, it is hard for the viewer to decide whether to laugh at, or cry with, the character.
More puzzling is the second question, however, as the litany of contradictions about Lee remain unexplained. The young man is shown to be underemployed, without a home, and naive in his own relationship with a flighty girlfriend, but somehow also a masterful manipulator of Yu’s feelings.
Love Lies is an admirable, if sometimes mannered, film that takes considerable narrative risks in picturing the absurd situations extreme loneliness can lead people into.
It is regrettable that the filmmakers believed they had to fall back regularly on the safety of comedy to keep us engaged: there is a profound and deeply sad story to be told about a scammer and his victim who find a spiritual connection, but Ho is too preoccupied with serving up frivolous fun on the side to look into both their hearts.
