A marketing decision by Mediacorp Raintree Pictures to include an additional nine minutes worth of movie scenes featuring Golden Horse best actress winner Joan Chen, resulted in cinematic bloopers in its latest movie to be released.
As part of its marketing ploy, “The Leap Years” is the first English romance movie to be scheduled for release on Feb. 29 to coincide with, well, the leap year. Production for the movie started as early as 2005. However, the extra scenes featuring Chen were shot by a different director and edited into various segments of the movie’s storyline, as part of raising the profile of the 103-minute film. As part of the plot, it was developed into a flashback sequence to reveal a time lapse into the lives of the two leads. In the scenes featuring the 46-year-old Chen, she is seen playing the role of the older version of Wong Li-Lin’s lead character, Li-Ann. As a seasoned thespian and winner of a Golden Horse trophy for her role in “The Home Song Stories,” Chen’s presence was to lend credence to the plot and weight to the cast. Instead, the appearance of the extra scenes left the movie poorly coordinated. In it, Chen’s elder Li-Ann is shown to be left-handed while writing, compared to Wong’s younger Li-Ann who writes with her right hand. And there was another greater discrepancy. Laotian-Australian actor Ananda Everingham’s lead character, Jeremy, was filmed without his distinctive mole under his right eye when the role was played by another actor portraying a senior version of him. The use of the flashback sequence was also not originally part of the novella, “Leap of Love,” by local author Catherine Lim. Speaking at the question-and-answer “Blog Aloud” session after the pre-release movie screening on Feb. 25 at VivoCity, director of the movie, Jean Yeo, said she was not responsible for these additional elements in the movie. In a carefully-worded response to a query raised by an audience member about the differences between the novel and the movie, Yeo said, “I think it was more a marketing decision by Raintree (Pictures) because there was this opportunity to get Joan Chen involved and I think it was more of a marketing strategy.” She added, “The nine minutes of Joan Chen part was not shot by me, it was shot by a second unit director. But I think it’s a very good marketing strategy. It will help in the distribution of the film.” The result of the lax directing is an observation made by this reviewer. Yeo was not approached to comment on these discrepancies. |
