In Love We Trust (2007)

In Beijing, China, a home investor named Mei Zhu has a 5 year old daughter named Hehe, who’s being sick from cancer and has 2-3 years left to live if she doesn’t have a bone marrow transplant. She needed her ex-husband, Xiao Lu to help their daughter by any means. They tried using donating their blood, but neither is a match to save. Their only option is to be together to mate to have another kid, so they can have a matching blood from the umbilical cord to save their child. However, both Mei Zhu and Xiao Lu have their spouse, and Xiao Lu doesn’t want to cheat on his current wife, Dong Fan (actual name of a person, not a pokemon). Dong Fan was furious from Xiao Lu’s choice until she sees Hehe, and realized how important she is. Mei Zhu’s current husband, Xie Huaicai instantly accepts the condition being with Xiao Lu in order to mate to save the daughter she devoted her life to. So Mei Zhu and Xiao Lu are going through trial and errors to see if they can make another kid in order to save their present kid.

This has the combination problem as another film, the supposedly child focus in Dragon Inn that would be stronger and suspenseful, but instead we focus on the couple to have less suspense. With that said, the couples in In Love We Trust are probably more engaging than Dragon Inn’s couple. They don’t distract away from the story, as they are the core of the story. Despite Hehe barely appeared in the film, thus we couldn’t be as emotionally connected to her whether she lived or died. There’s rarely a film that stars the dying child without focusing the parent(s) or friend(s), as proven with Secret of Nimh, Christmas Carol, Balto, Halloween Tree, and to name a few. Even there was a film that has the story of the dying star child, it’ll mostly show he/ she will be fine at the end, unless they did die as we’ll tear up from how much we knew the child and invested we got. The closest film I know is Hayao Miyazaki’s Grave of the Firefly.    

If this film was fueled by emotions, this movie would be sad in theory. There’s rarely a film that made me sad to tears. There are plenty of films to give different range of emotion. There’s comedy to mostly make laughter, action to mostly make amazement, horror to rarely scare (and Tim Burton’s Mars Attack), a bad film that has horrible visuals and relies on annoyance lead to anger, and a predictably, repetitive, gray, unemotional, wooden, and slow film lead boredom. Sadly, this film is somewhere at the ladder. If this film didn’t spend too long with their slow scenes that goes nowhere. Most of the characters are having around 1 to 3 expression. Mei Zhu has the most expression of sadness, joy, and anger, which understands that her daughter’s sick, but happy to see she’s getting better, and mad that Xiao Lu isn’t trying with the sex. The Spouse has two with happy and sad, while Xiao Lu is mostly stoic. Romance by all variety (boy meets girl, girl meets boy, boy meets boy, girl meet girl, and adult version) is the least interested genre, since they’re mostly the same with them meeting, dating, breaking, or reconnecting, and often get together or apart at the end. It’s no secret that I’m mostly alone in life, not really a romantic cocky kind of man, and has some love to family, pets, and characters in certain films. In Love We Trust has good intention to have a couple to get back together in order to save a child, but with pacing issues and disconnection, this is one love and trust to pass.