Sax von Stroheim writes:

Johnnie To usually makes movies about cops and robbers, but in the spirit of the great Hollywood studio directors, he seems willing and able to tackle any popular genre. In the comments on his recent post on Double-Digit Directors, Fabrizio admitted that while he likes To, he wasn’t a fan of some of the maestro’s recent romantic melodramas. Since they’re among my favorites and they tend to get overlooked by U.S. fans of his crime pictures, I thought I’d say a few things about them.

Romancing in Thin Air is a romantic fable worthy of Minnelli: I think it may be Johnnie’s greatest film so far – or at least his greatest film not about cops and criminals. It’s a movie about the power and seduction of happy endings, but it isn’t cynical about it: it’s made by someone who still believes that the movies – big, goofy, sentimental entertainments – can save your life.

And it’s definitely sentimental: it’s a love triangle, where one corner of the triangle is missing and presumed dead. The question: can a flesh and blood person ever really compete against a memory? The story is worked out in quite a sophisticated manner, with the same kind of doubling and narrative rhyming that To uses in his crime flicks. Sammi Cheng stars in it and she is super cute:

Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, which is co-directed by Wai Ka-Fai, is another love triangle movie, but it’s more of a straight-up romantic comedy and less of a melodrama than Romancing in Thin Air. It does have the same kind of fable-like structure and Minnellian mise-en-scène, though. Yuanyuan Gao stars in it and she is also super cute:

There’s a great scene where Louis Koo and Yuanyuan are flirting with each other from their adjacent office buildings by putting up cute drawings in their window that is pretty much my definition of “real cinema”. David Bordwell usually does a great job of getting across how these kinds of sequences work just by posting screenshots: I’m no David Bordwell, but here’s the jist of it:

Hey, dig those ‘scope compositions! People making these kinds of movies in America aren’t really thinking in terms of telling the story through the filmmaking anymore: the screenplays are much more play-driven and not especially screen-driven.

Related

• Both of these movies are available for streaming on Hulu.
• David Bordwell writes a little bit about Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, here.
• Fabrizio wrote about To’s Life Without Principle, here. Life Without Principle makes a neat double-bill with Don’t Go Breaking My Heart: their plots both pivot around the financial crisis, but Life Without Principle is more in the vein of his crime thrillers. It stars Denise Ho, who is also also super cute: