It
must be an olfactory thing. Gu Shengnan and Lu Jin can’t stand each other
unless she is cooking for him. She is a sous-chef and he is a hotel tycoon, so
they both know food. They just don’t know they’re in love yet, but her dog
Boss, an adorable English Bull Terrier, knows it just as well as we do. Somehow
all that cooking pays off in Derek Hui’s This
is not What I Expected (trailer here), which opens today in New York.
Lu
Jin has checked into room 1123 of his latest Shanghai acquisition—and if the
kitchen staff does not impress him with something before he checks out at noon,
the entire hotel is in trouble. Bafflingly, Gu’s boss (and the ex who just
dumped her) waits till the very last minute to ask her to take a shot, but her
flair for flavor and aroma saves the day. Soon she is constantly creating
dishes to meet room 1123’s challenges.
Much
to her embarrassment, Gu realizes Lu Jin is the same rich jerk she previously
met under rather disadvantageous circumstances, so she will go to great lengths
to avoid a face-to-face meeting. Yet, fate keeps conspiring to bring them
together. After years of eating alone, is Lu Jin finally really for ramen for
two? If you doubt it, go ask Boss.
Frankly,
TINWIE might be the most misnamed
film of the year. It is pretty much exactly what we expected, but Hui sure
knows how to stage some culinary indulgences. In fact, the cooking scenes are
executed with such colorful visual panache, they pull us through the
predictable storyline. Plus, Boss certainly holds up his end as well.
The
food and the dog up-stage everyone (basically, W.C. Fields was right, he just
didn’t take it far enough), but Zhou Dongyu (still red hot popular in China for
the local smash SoulMates) is ridiculously
cute (and only slightly cloying) as the plucky, brow-furrowing Gu. On the other
hand, Takeshi Kaneshiro’s Lu Jin is such a cold jerkheel, it is hard to believe
he never gets a Wüsthof through the heart from someone on the exhausted kitchen
staff. However, Lin Chi-ling adds some heat as Gu’s third act culinary adversary
and perhaps romantic rival as well—in fact, the film suggests they are basically
one and the same.
