PREVIEW. Full review will come with US release.
A child lost and found in ChinaPeter Chan's
Dearest, an intermittently interesting but poorly organized film about lost and abducted children, follows Tian (Huang Bo) and Lu (Hao Lei), a divorced couple whose three-year-old son Pengpeng has wandered off and been stolen after Lu, who's remarried, has left him off at Tian's little Internet cafe. They join a lost-child support group that goes out tracking down child abductors and, alone among the group's numerous members, they actually do find their child. Then, mid-way, the story turns from button-pushing child-abduction tear jerker to questioning essay. The adoptive mother appears, who has raised the child innocently, not knowing he was abducted. Since she has had the boy as long as Tian and Lu, isn't it cruel to pluck the boy from her? Who is the real parent, the birth parent, or the adopted one that the child has come to love? This is an interesting dilemma. But the film shifts focus often, and has structural problems.
Dearest, 128 mins., debuted at Venice 2014, also showing at Toronto; over a dozen other international festivals, and screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, May 2015.