‘True Love, For Once In My Life’ review: Fruit Chan produces smartphone-shot Hong Kong drama

Dir: Delon Siu Koon-ho. Hong Kong. 2024. 110mins

The pain that results from one partner’s infidelity and the upheaval of divorce forms the foundation of Delon Siu Koon-ho’s True Love, For Once In My Life, an unvarnished, almost cinema vérité-style drama chronicling a Hong Kong woman’s life as she goes from wife to mother to widow over 20 years. Rather than simply fixate on the disintegration of a marriage, Siu also ponders the possibly of true love, soul mates and fate. Rough around the edges, intimate and experimental, True Love is lifted above its clearly modest budget by its willingness to acknowledge a uniquely Hong Kong type of infidelity – cross-border philandering – and a strong central performance from popular veteran Cecilia Yip Tung.

Acknowledges a uniquely Hong Kong type of infidelity

Even though True Love, For Once In My Life is not the direct product of recent government policies designed to cultivate the next generation of filmmakers – such as the First Feature Film Initiative, which produced Oliver Chan Siu-kuen’s Still Human and Sasha Chuk Tsz-yin’s Fly Me To The Moon among others – it is part of a wave of inward-looking independent films that have been proliferating in Hong Kong over the last decade or so. Produced by independent godhead Fruit Chan (Made in Hong Kong, Dumplings) and starring Yip and fellow veteran Tse Kwan-ho (box office hit A Guilty Conscience), long time art director Siu’s debut is notable for being the first Hong Kong feature shot on iPhone. 

As the industry struggles to reinvent so-called Hong Kong cinema beyond the boundaries of crime thrillers and marital arts action films, the guerrilla nature of True Love, For Once In My Life represents a curious new wrinkle for local producers. The film premiered at Pingyao, and other indie festivals could come calling. Wider arthouse distribution will likely rely on how well Chan and company clean up the film’s low-fi elements, but it should resonate with local audiences when it opens in Hong Kong on March 7.

True Love, For Once In My Life begins in the early 2000s, a time when Hong Kong businesses were exploiting the potential of China’s Guangzhou region. Moving back and forth across the border was lucrative, but was also a strain on marriages and families. Hongkonger Sabrina (Yip) is working an anonymous office job while her childhood sweetheart and accountant husband Andrew (Tse) dumps his practice to begin seeking unspecified opportunities in Guangzhou. Before long, Andrew abandons Sabrina and their two children, asks for a divorce and remarries. Ironically, when Andrew takes ill and returns to Hong Kong for medical treatment, it’s Sabrina he leans on for comfort – and she doesn’t hesitate to return to him.

The film is based on the autobiographical novel by Sabrina Tse Shuk-fun, who executive produces and co-wrote the screenplay with Lou Shiu-wa (Eric Tsang’s Hong Kong Family, Ann Hui’s The Way We Are) — and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it gives Yip plenty to work with. Absentee spouses and partners who work overseas are by no means unique to Hong Kong, but the film shines a light on how cross-border careers and infidelities particularly affect families in this city. The uneasy relationship between Sabrina and Andrew in many ways mirrors the one between Hong Kong and the mainland over the last quarter century.

Raw, naturalistic smartphone images lend the film a voyeuristic tone, as if the viewer is spying on Sabrina’s family breakdown and her ultimate acceptance of a solitary life post-divorce. Siu, Tse and Lou make it clear the divorce inordinately impacts Sabrina, and she’s the one left to make peace with her adult children (Hui Yuet-sheung and Himmy Wong Ting-him).

It’s also clear Sabrina is a believer in the concept of having one true love and Yip (Patrick Tam’s Nomad) makes her selflessness understandable, holding the slight narrative together by giving her character resilience and empathy without ever letting her to tip over into pitiable.