BELOVED：More Alone than Ever

An ambitious exploration of a young businesswoman\'s emotional identity that largely avoids the obvious, BELOVED marks a confident feature debut by writer-director Li Xinman, with a sturdy central performance by the versatile Yu Nan. The story of a wealthy young Chinese businesswoman, Lu Xueni, who\'s suddenly required to recalibrate her feelings after the death of her Japanese adoptive mother, could easily have become a routine tale of cultural confusion, a predictable search for roots or another film about angst among China\'s new yuppie class. Instead, the tightly written screenplay sidesteps all three, and focuses instead on the main character\'s emotional dislocation when her birth mother appears out of the blue.

BELOVED  throws together two themes — "does blood equal love?" and "you can\'t choose where you come from" — as the icily controlled Xueni, working for a Japanese company in Shanghai, sees her life thrown for a loop as an old Chinese peasant woman, Wang Yufen, turns up on her doorstep claiming to be her birth-mother. There\'s a lot of background to digest in the film\'s first half-hour — which is only revealed in bits and pieces, and may prove confusing to general viewers — but the essence is that Xueni\'s adoptive mother was actually a Japanese woman who in turn had been adopted after World War II by a Chinese family. Just when Xueni had finally learned to love her adoptive mother as her own, she\'s now faced with a stranger who demands her love as her real mother. In her own words, she feels more alone than ever.

As the film doesn\'t devolve into some kind of "Am I Chinese or Japanese?" drama — in fact, the scenes between Xueni and her Japanese colleagues and family are handled with a refreshing naturalness — the over-schematic background of Xueni and her adoptive mother is not overplayed. As soon as Yufen installs herself in Xueni\'s house, the movie finds its true centre in a lightly played drama, spiced with welcome humour, of an urban yuppie and a simple peasant who have to find common ground because of an apparent blood tie.

Power-dressed and playing older than she is, Yu is equally believable as a control-freak exec and as a woman who tries to learn there\'s more to life than business meetings. The slow-burning chemistry between her and her elderly birth mother is excellent.

For her first feature Li sensibly hired some top tech staff, and the movie is aided considerably by the coolly gliding camerawork of Yu Lik-wai and smooth editing by the experienced Zhang Yifan. The Achilles Heel of the script is that the main emotional driver is a voiceover by the dead adoptive mother, which turns Xueni into a reactive rather than proactive character in what should be her own movie. According to an end title, the film was inspired by the real-life story of a woman called Wang Lichun.