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paper, "Daisy" sounds like an Asian film
fan's dream come true, directed by "Infernal
Affairs" co-helmer Andrew Lau and
starring everybody's favourite sassy girl, popular
Korean actress Jeon Ji Hyun. Unfortunately,
despite the talent involved, and the fact that the
crew flew halfway around the world to shoot in
Amsterdam
, the film turns out to be a bit of a
disappointment, being a clichéd romantic drama
which wallows in misery and self importance.
The plot follows Hye Young
(Jeon Ji Hyun), a rather naïve Korean girl who
lives in
Amsterdam
, spending her life working in her grandfather's
antique shop and doing portraits for tourists. One
day, she begins receiving flowers at exactly the
same time from a secret admirer, who she believes
to be a mystery man from her past who once built
her a nice little bridge. One day she meets Jeong
Woo (Lee Seong Jae, also in "Holiday"
and "Public
Enemy"), who unbeknownst to her is
actually an Interpol agent tracking Asian
criminals in the
Netherlands
.
With Hye Young assuming that
Jeong Woo is responsible for the flowers, the two
fall very slowly into a chaste romantic
relationship. However, it turns out that the man
sending the flowers is actually Park Yi (Jung Woo
Sung, from "Sad Movie" and "Musa"),
an assassin working for a Chinese crime syndicate.
Inevitably, the love triangle turns tragic and the
two men end up facing off while poor Hye Young
tries to work out which of the two is the love of
her life.
Although "Daisy" is
ostensibly a love story, it has the feel of a
funeral, with a slow, sombre pace and a plot which
piles on the misery. Half of the film's running
time is taken up with scenes of the characters
staring longingly out of windows into the rain,
with the silence broken only by bouts of self
pitying narration. Director Lau seems to be under
the impression that the film is a weighty
Shakespearean tragedy, rather than yet another
gloomy hitman love story. As such, the proceedings
have a rather pretentious air, despite the fact
that the plot is inherently predictable and based
largely around glaring clichés borrowed liberally
from the likes of "Fulltime
Killer" and John Woo's classic "The
Killer".
Almost every aspect of the
film is riddled with angst, with the three lead
characters suffering as if the weight of the world
was on their shoulders, and steadfastly refusing
to do anything to pursue their romantic
inclinations. Park Yi in particular, as the kind
of overly emotional, socially retarded assassin so
beloved of modern cinema, is faintly ludicrous,
from his blatant incompetence on the job to his
hilarious attempts to discuss impressionist
painting with Hye Young or his penchant for flower
growing. This languid passivity does make the
film's central romance somewhat hard to swallow,
and Lau's attempts to evoke the feeling that it is
fate which brings the characters together comes
across more as shoddy coincidence.
Fans of Jeon Ji Hyun should
note that her character is far closer to her role
in the glum supernatural drama "The
Uninvited" than "My
Sassy Girl" or "Windstruck",
and while she tries her best to pull a few wacky
faces here and there, her performance is certainly
more subdued.
The film benefits from glossy
production values, and Lau makes good use of the
Amsterdam
scenery, playing on the contrast between the grey,
almost gothic beauty of the city and the innocent
blue skies and flowery fields of the countryside.
Unfortunately, he tends to overuse slow motion for
some of the emotional scenes, which when coupled
with some of the picture postcard visuals gives
the film the feel at times of a perfume advert.
There are a few scenes of surprisingly violent
action, though these are few and far between, and
whilst well staged, seem to have been thrown in as
an afterthought and do little more than briefly
raising the pulse.
Despite its flaws,
"Daisy" makes for engaging viewing, and
the story grips almost in spite of itself, mainly
out of a morbid fascination to see not which of
the men Hye Young will end up with, but to see who
will lie dying in her arms. The self indulgent
melodrama works well enough to tick all the right
boxes for the genre, and the film functions
perfectly well as an enjoyably glossy, weepy
romance.
It is worth noting that the
DVD features the director's cut of the film, which
for once indicates that it is substantially
different from the theatrical version, which not
only adds 25 minutes, but reorders some of the
scenes, making the narrative less linear. Although
this new version is perhaps too long, it is surely
superior, as without these changes, the film would
surely have been even more conventional and would
have suffered from even murkier character
development.
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