【电影简介】

小白领金天（王丽坤饰）遭遇未婚夫背叛、相依为命的奶奶陈兰心（徐静蕾饰）去世之后，决定抛开过去，重获新生，来到奶奶曾经生活过的地方布拉格，追寻奶奶的爱情回忆，而在释放自我和寻找记忆的过程中，遇到了彭泽阳（吴亦凡饰），一段奶奶尘封的爱情也慢慢在她面前展开。

【音频文本】

February 14 2015, while the world relished director Sam Taylor Johnson's erotic drama "Fifty Shades of Grey" on Valentine's Day, Chinese lovers had to settle for a tourism marketing video in the guise of a love story.

"Somewhere Only We Know", or "'You Yi Ge Di Fang Zhi You Wo Men Zhi Dao", is a romantic story with minimumnudity. It is about the encounters of a young Chinese woman who has been dumped at the altar. In order to calm her nerves after the traumatic experience and also to revisit one episode of her late grandmother's past, Jin Tian travels to the Eastern European city of Prague, where she meets rich kid and single dad Ze Yang.

The story basically follows the recipe of every other romantic film. The two characters eventually grow fond of each other despite some initial misunderstandings, but more challenges will emerge before they are to live happily ever after.

Apart from the predictable storyline, there are also some unexpected and unpleasant surprises.

Take the first half hour for example where the director juggles mismatching tasks. On the one hand, she wants to make the best of the exotic scenery in Prague, so here we have the typical sunny, dreamy-coloured shots, similar to the demonstration videos played by TV salesmen in their stores. On the other hand, the director also tries desperately to convince the audience about the trauma our dear heroine has sustained from a failed relationship. To achieve this, the film plays ghostly music every time our fair actress gives in to distraught recollection. The ghostly music may work for horror films, but definitely doesn't go with the beautiful pictures.

However, what bothers me the most are not the constant close-ups on the early Baroque style architecture and the young couple's smooth faces amid a haunting soundtrack, if I covered my ears, the pictures were still pleasant to look at. However I could not stand the clumsy way the film trumpets a so-called "international flavour". When Jin Tian discovers a love letter addressed to her grandmother, she was not able to readit because it is written in the Czech language. She turns to Ze Yang for translation, and he reads it out in Chinese. Then half way during the reading, touching music kicks in and the old Czech writer himself reads the latter half in ENGLISH! In fact, every major Prague character in the film speaks English rather than their native West Slavic language.

If the purpose is to sound "International", perhaps the director could let the Czech characters speak their native tongue, most Chinese viewers are reading the subtitles for the English dialogue anyway. Or the conversations could all be dubbed into Chinese, I don't suppose any Chinese viewer would object to that. Butif I were allowed to indulge my imagination and meanness a bit, I think the reason is perhaps our dear director herself speaks a bit of English and would like to show off her linguistic prowess in the role of thecharming grandmother.

It is a mean speculation, but one that rather befits Xu Jinglei's public profile as a female talent. 10 years ago, Ms Xu was the blog queen of China. With decent calligraphy skills and a face not too bad to look at, she was able to attract followers in their tens of millions to visit her blog space, where she offerednothing particularly interesting but the simple life of a celebrity. The fact that she was among the firstto set up a blog plus her knowledge about and access to an exclusive part of the world simply fueled public curiosity.

This kind of monopoly of knowledge and information is being challenged by the advent of the Internet and proliferation of mobile devices. With a few taps on their smartphones, the Chinese people can now instantlylearn about the lives of people around the world, and with increased wealth, more of them can afford to travel overseas to see the world for themselves. Prague, or any other city for that matter, is no longer somewhere only the director knows, but somewhere everyone can know.

As China continues to open up, amateur directors will find it increasingly difficult to shortchange their viewers with patchy "international flavours". Soon they'll have to choose between obscurity and making really good films.

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