General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Perhaps Love (如果·爱) (2005 film)

Perhaps Love (如果·爱) is a 2005 Hong Kong musical romance film directed by Peter Chan (陳可辛), in which a love triangle among three film people plays out both on a film set and in the musical-within-the-film they are shooting. It stars Takeshi Kaneshiro as Hong Kong actor Lin Jiandong, Zhou Xun as the star actress Sun Na, Jacky Cheung as film director Nie Wen, and Ji Jin-hee as a storyteller figure who links the film's three time frames.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / co-director	Peter Chan; co-director Samson Chiu¹
Writers	Aubrey Lam (林爱华), Raymond To (杜国威), James Yuen, Jessica Fong³
Music and design	Music director Peter Kam (金培达); art director Yee Chung-man (奚仲文)¹
Format	2005, color, 35mm, Cantonese and Mandarin, 108 minutes¹
Budget	80 million RMB²
Mainland release	December 2, 2005; Chan's first film shot and released in mainland China²
Festival and awards	Closing film at the Venice Film Festival; Hong Kong's entry for the foreign-language category of the 78th Academy Awards²
Choreography	Bollywood choreographer Farah Khan staged the musical numbers¹

Spoilers

Plot

The story is set in Beijing and spans ten years.² Sun Na, born into poverty, abandoned her lover Lin Jiandong to survive and succeed, and with the help of film director Nie Wen achieved her dream of becoming a movie star.² Ten years later, Sun Na is cast in the musical film Wu Wang Wo (毋忘我, roughly "Forget Me Not"), directed by her current boyfriend Nie Wen, and the male lead is her former lover Lin Jiandong. She refuses to acknowledge their past, and the three develop a complicated relationship on and off the set.¹

The film runs three strands in parallel: the film-within-the-film, the present, and the past. In the embedded musical, the triangle is reproduced, with Nie Wen playing a circus master, Sun Na his trapeze-artist lover, and Lin the man from her past.⁴ Images recur across the strands: a frozen river in Beijing, a pool of "water of forgetfulness" in Shanghai, and the flying trapeze on the studio set. Ji Jin-hee's character acts as a storyteller who strings together the three stories set in different periods and places.¹^•²

The Hong Kong Film Archive's synopsis summarizes the film's theme as the line "the person who loves you most is always yourself": love is not life's redemption, and each person moves forward alone, with regrets, but that is how life is.¹

Production

Chan began shooting in Beijing in early February 2005, in cold weather and with the production closed to media visits. It was his first film shot in mainland China, with a budget of more than 80 million RMB, and it brought together creative personnel associated with War of the Beauty (金枝欲孽) and Comrades, Almost a Love Story (甜蜜蜜).⁵

The musical element. Chan said the musical portions make up about 30 percent of the film's length, in six numbers, three of them large-scale set pieces. He described the film as, beneath its ornate musical surface, a traditional Chinese love story, using the direct and exaggerated musical form to push the audience's understanding of love as the film's theme.² He was not a musical enthusiast by background and prepared by studying musicals daily and attending dance performances in Beijing during production.⁵ He later told the South China Morning Post that he had sat through "50 or 60" musicals before starting production, and that "the people had to have a legitimate reason to be singing"; the film, he said, is not a musical in the traditional sense.⁶

Chan cast Indian choreographer Farah Khan to stage the song-and-dance numbers, and the four leads sang their own parts: Jacky Cheung, an established singer, alongside Kaneshiro, Zhou Xun, and Ji Jin-hee.¹ The Screen review described the choreography and music as more traditional than the film's structure, borrowing from Busby Berkeley, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Cultural Revolution-era visual style, and 1950s circus films.⁴

Setting and snow. Chan chose Beijing partly because he wanted a snow scene in which the two leads meet and fall in love. Beijing did not snow during more than a week of the relevant shooting, so the production used artificial snow, including nearly three tons of it for a scene near Andingmen bridge.⁵

Release and reception

The film first appeared abroad as the closing film of the Venice Film Festival, and in September 2005 the Hong Kong Producers Association announced it as Hong Kong's entry for the foreign-language film category of the 78th Academy Awards.² It opened in mainland China on December 2, 2005.²

Finances. By September 2005, before the mainland release, Chan said the 80 million RMB investment had already been recovered through pre-sales, with the film sold to Japan, Korea, Italy, and Spain and negotiations under way for North America. He said overseas distribution was going "very well" but that he valued the mainland market more, expecting the Beijing setting to resonate with mainland audiences.⁷ A later retrospective account put the mainland box office at about 30 million RMB, noting that despite a good reputation within the industry the film's takings fell short.⁸ A 2013 Chinese report likewise states that the film's box office did not meet expectations.⁹

Critical response. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 77% Tomatometer from two critic reviews and more than 5,000 audience ratings.¹⁰ Screen's Venice review called it a lavish but insubstantial musical love story, a "seeming Chinese answer to Moulin Rouge", and predicted strong performance in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and mainland China while expecting Chinese-language songs to confine it to niche slots elsewhere.⁴ The lovehkfilm review judged it an ambitious and worthwhile effort and "easily one of the best Hong Kong films of 2005", while warning viewers against expecting the warmth of a conventional musical.¹¹ On IMDb it rates 6.8/10 from about 2,900 users.¹²

Place in Peter Chan's career

The Hong Kong Film Archive frames the film as the product of Chan's "pan-Asian" period at Applause Pictures, after which he "went north" to mainland production. It reprises the love-triangle structure of his 1996 Comrades, Almost a Love Story, with Beijing and Shanghai replacing that film's Hong Kong and New York, and the Archive reads the film as Chan's personal farewell to Hong Kong filmmaking.¹ Scholars have treated it as a leading example of mise-en-abîme metacinema, a film about the making of a film.¹³ Academic commentary has also noted that most discussion of the film concerns its pan-Asian production mode, with Bollywood choreography and a Korean star alongside Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and mainland cast members, and its musical-genre aesthetics.¹⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026