When Wolf Falls In Love With Sheep
Hou Chi-jan
The story: Tung (Kai Ko) has been unceremoniously dumped by his girlfriend via a post-it note which reads: “I’m off to cram school.” So he ends up working in a photocopying shop in cram school central, Nanyang Street, while searching for her. The denizens of that hermetic world include the shy and dreamy teaching assistant Yang (Chien Man-shu), who draws pictures of sheep on the exam papers. One day, Tung doodles a sketch of a big bad wolf in response.

The danger of associating a movie with a past hit is that you might be saddling the new work with unrealistic expectations to live up to.
So it did the crime thriller Cold War no favours to be linked to the superior drama Infernal Affairs (2002). And it does not help Wolf to be compared to the raucous yet warm-hearted youth drama You Are The Apple Of My Eye (2011).
The obvious reason for doing so is that rising star Kai Ko is in both flicks. And the easy-on-the-eye actor’s charms is indeed a selling point. There is a sunniness to Ko which is adorable and you are soon rooting for him to find happiness.
His burgeoning romance with Yang, which is the Mandarin homonym for sheep, is handled in an admirably low- key manner. Still, it would have been nice to have a little more fireworks between Ko and the gamine Chien Man-shu.
One cannot help though but think back to the chemistry that Ko had with Michelle Chen in Apple.
And director Hou Chi-jan’s sensibility is more arthouse compared to Apple’s Giddens Ko’s crowd-pleasing one. After all, Hou’s debut feature was the magic realist One Day (2010). With Wolf, he makes an attempt to straddle both arthouse offering and mainstream romantic comedy.
He injects a gentle kookiness to the proceedings, such as using live-action stop-motion for some sequences. He also introduces a cast of quirky supporting characters ranging from ultra-driven salesgirl Tsui Pao-pao (Kou Shu-yau) to a popular masked food-seller to a wise and mysterious noodle-seller.
While this adds colour to the film, it also drags the film out and Hou could have done a better job with the pacing. The dialogue is not quite sparkling as well though it does not descend into overly precious territory.
The finale gets it right with a grand romantic gesture and ends on a note of bright optimism tinged with some humour. If only Wolf was a film to cuddle up to from start to finish.