‘This Is Not What I Expected’: Mismatched lovers are on the menu
MOST of the dialogue in ‘ This Is Not What I Expected’ is in Mandarin, but that hardly matters to viewers who don’t speak it. From the sizzling griddle that opens the story to a hallucinogenic trip triggered by blowfish toxin, this engagingly goofy romantic comedy speaks the international language of food.
Scrawny but cute heroine Shengnan (Zhou Dongyu) is a Shanghai chef whose cooking can be artistic, erotic or even narrative. Her possible soul mate is Lu ( Takeshi Kaneshiro), an imperious multimillionaire who might buy the hotel where Shengnan works. Lu doesn’t like much about the place, but he adores Shengnan’s EuroChinese- Japanese cuisine.
The hitch is that he can’t stand her. They meet several times before he even realises that she’s the hotel kitchen’s maestro, and each encounter is a slapstick disaster. Eventually, of course, prissy Lu will come to appreciate everything about scruffy Shengnan.
Made on the Chinese mainland by Hong Kong writer- director Derek Hui, this good-natured farce is as eclectic as Shengnan’s cooking. The soundtrack is heavy on Bob Dylan, and Hui pays homage to “Tampopo”, the 1985 “noodle Western,” by giving Lu an obsession with making the perfect bowl of instant ramen. That quest is, like this movie, absurd but endearing. WP-Bloomberg
* Two and one-half stars. Unrated. Contains humour related to dog droppings. In Mandarin, English and Thai with subtitles. 105 minutes.
* Ratings Guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time.