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Restless

1998, Movie, NR, 100 mins

Restless: Review

RESTLESS
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This intermittently charming look at East-meets-West culture shock in contemporary Beijing seriously overreaches its grasp. It seems to be striving for something almost James-ian in its portrait of callow Americans heedlessly wounding themselves and others as they barrel headlong through cultures whose intricacies they don't understand, but winds up looking more than a little like an exotic episode of Sex and the City. From the time she was a child, Leah Quinn (Catherine Kellner) dreamed of romance and adventure in far-away places. Now in her twenties, she's mastered Chinese and spent three years living in Beijing, but is still looking for true love. Asian-American beach bum Richard Kao (David Wu), by contrast, has "never been farther East than East L.A." until he's charged with returning his grandpa's ashes to China. Since Richard went to high school with Leah, he turns to her for help when he arrives in bustling Beijing. Leah, meanwhile, has just had her heart broken by an American businessman and, encouraged by her free-spirited friend Jane (Sarita Choudhury), is embarking on a new relationship with Sun Zhan (Geng Le), a master of the Chinese strategy game weiqi ("go"). And after meeting his relatives, Richard realizes both that his family history is more complicated than he knew and that he's falling in love with his cousin Qing Qing (Chen Shiang-Chyi). First-time feature filmmaker Jule Gilfillan studied film at USC and the Beijing Film Academy, and worked with director John Woo; she clearly knows the emotional territory she's exploring. But her film is very slight indeed, and undermined by uneven performances; overall, the older performers are more interesting than the younger ones, and it's especially unfortunate that Kellner's characterization is so insubstantial and that Wu seems permanently stuck in "Whoa, dude" mode. (In English and Mandarin, with English subtitles.) leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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