Viva La Vida

Ling Min is waiting for a kidney transplant and her place on the list is not coming. She finds a solution: marry someone who can donate one. Lü Tu is a young man with a brain condition for which there appears to be no treatment. They meet and make an arrangement. Then the arrangement turns into something else. Han Yan directs. Li Gengxi plays Ling Min and Peng Yuchang plays Lü Tu. It runs 129 minutes, opened in China on 30 March 2024, and took over 38 million dollars worldwide. The source is not fiction but a piece of reportage about a real case. The danger is the subject itself. Romantic drama built on terminal illness has been produced heavily in China and elsewhere and the template is familiar. What holds the film up is the two performances; both actors avoid escalation and refuse to play their characters as people to be pitied. The best material is the everyday texture of illness: dialysis hours, insurance, being unable to get work, and how the families react. The film does not push that behind the romance. It had been scheduled for the Spring Festival, was withdrawn and moved to the start of April, and that decision was argued about in China at the time. Who it is for: viewers who follow contemporary Chinese drama and relationships built around illness. Who it is not for: the template is very familiar, it runs long, and the last section raises the emotional register noticeably.