I Love You

This sloppily crafted blast of misogyny confirms the impression left by Seventeen Years of a career heading towards creative freefall. Based on a novel by Zhang's new best friend Wang Shuo, who achieved minor notoriety in the 1980s as a censor-challenging chronicler of the new delinquency, this is an account of a marriage from hell. Yi (Tong) marries trainee nurse Ju (Xu) on the rebound (she was engaged to a friend of his who died diving into an empty pool) and quickly discovers that beneath her girly charm lurks a psychotic bitch. She starts out making unreasonable demands and picking fights. Before long she's tying him up in his sleep and holding knives to his jugular. Hard to credit that this naff variation on Fatal Attraction came from the same director as the subtle and psychologically acute East Palace, West Palace.