Tainted Love Review: Zhou Dongyu Is Elusively Magnetic In Frustrating Love-Scam Drama
Zhou Dongyu wants to get revenge on a romance scammer.
Tainted Love (PG13)
Starring Zhou Dongyu, Zhang Yu, Zhang Youhao
Directed by Ma Yingxin
After the exciting, straightforward Mainland Chinese online-gambling scam hit, No More Bets, here comes its sedate, slowed-down version about a phone love scam. That basically is as ambiguous and elusive as the face of its lead actress, Zhou Dongyu.
No More Bets is about shutting down a cyber-slavery farm in lawless Southeast Asia. Tainted Love is about a victim’s quest for justice in a dubious southern Chinese city.
Current It girl Zhou (The Breaking Ice), plays Zhou Ran, an educated but lonely woman from Beijing who’s a figure of porcelain inscrutability. Love-scammed out of her money, she becomes internally damaged while hellbent on revenge, making you wonder what's really on her mind.
The film says that back in 2016, single urban women were prime targets for romance scams involving mobile-phone wooing. Ran’s heart flutters whenever contact pops up from a sweet-talking PRC guy in Singapore who texts her like a boyfriend, calls her baby and sings a love song on the phone.
“You’re in Beijing, I’m in Singapore, but we see the same moon every night,” he coos.
But after the man coaxes her into transferring half a million RMB (S$94,000) to him, he ghosts the alarmed smitten girl by going totally silent.
Now, the scammers in No More Bets are clearcut, irredeemable villains. Tainted Love’s baddies, though, are nebulous. This flick portrays the murky relationship between male scammers and female victims as something worth exploring which makes it very frustrating to watch, considering how hated these crooks are.
Hey, if somebody swindles you big bucks and you amazingly manage to track him down to an unfamiliar, unruly place in ginormous China, wouldn’t you demand that he PayNow you back every single cent right now?
You don’t get close with the fella, stroll on the beach, sing karaoke, drink beer and generally hang out with the bastard like this gal does, correct?
“There’s only ever one chance,” Ran states cryptically about trust. Although you don’t know whether she’s planning to nail that dude — a shifty-looking guy, Lin Zhiguang (Sniper’s Zhang Yu) — or kiss him.
Or maybe I just don’t understand the intricacies of a cheated woman’s mind.
Writer-director, Ma Yingxin, making her debut film, understands the dislocation of a woman in alien territory quite well.
Based in Spain, she infuses Tainted Love with an obtuse Euro-pic sense of probing-drama narrative.
There’s a three-person thing going on here with Lin’s superficial scammer bro, Xu Zhao (The Eight Hundred’s Zhang Youhao), having the hots for Ran without knowing the pair’s previous fishy connection.
It all looks psychological with lots of time spent on Ran sussing out Lin and Lin, in turn, knowing why she’s there. While we keep wondering, seriously, why is she still sticking around since all that shady guy has is maybe a persuasive handsome-sounding voice?
Because this tale isn’t really that deep since even while teetering, Chinese people don’t normally go full-on Eva Green unwired.
Ma does create an interesting mood by layering the latent tentativeness with a mystical nod to the unknowable with foggy scenes on a local island where an all-powerful Buddha statue looks after seemingly both good folks and bad.
Presumably, love, trust, money and betrayal are a heady mix anywhere for any god or writer to conjure. And director Ma is, of course, saying that a woman cheated out of her money and heart at the same time is a creature most unfathomable, as exemplified by the magnetically enigmatic Zhou Dongyu.
“No one can go through life investing or trusting emotionally,” she’s advised about sentimental, not cents-and-dollars, investment.
Me? Forget about girly feelings and all that stuff.
I just want her to get her money back. (2.5/5 stars)
Photos: Shaw Organisation