Set in Hawaii, a surfer falls in love with a spunky tattoo artist who only eats nail clippers…
The appearance of A Nail Clipper Romance’s ostentatious poster design splattered in a riot of clashing colours and eye-popping, hand-drawn visuals might deceive one into thinking the film is simply a rehashed adaptation of the infectiously upbeat, 2010 American cult classic Scott Pilgrim Versus The World, which was based on a series of graphic novels. In all fairness, A Nail Clipper Romance does not quite exactly fit the weird, the wacky and the wonderful; rather this debut film by Hong Kong cinematographer-turned-director Jason Kwan and based on a short story from co-producer Pang Ho-cheung, is best described as a whimsical, imaginative yet surprisingly low-key romantic comedy hinging on rather low stakes (to be specific, mild monetary loss and another broken heart).
The film opens with hopeless romantic Sean (Joseph Chang), a surfer in Hawaii recovering from a near-drowning incident and nursing a broken heart after being cheated on by his ex-girlfriend (Tiffany Ann Hsu). When he meets spunky, young tattoo artist Emily (Zhou Dongyu), he is immediately smitten by her and determined to open his heart to love again. But their budding relationship is threatened when Emily reveals that she is in fact a Nail Clipper Monster, forcing Sean to question all he has ever known to be true.
A Nail Clipper Romance puts a refreshing twist on the standard rom-com fare with the construction of a quirky meta-universe, where Nail Clippers Monsters like Emily- humans who eat nail clippers- live in hiding among ordinary everyday folk, careful to not expose their identities for fear of being captured by scientists for scientific study. The film is visually creative, peppered with cheeky animation and intricately sketched graphic inserts that work well in delivering exposition about Emily’s peculiar community- from the historical origins and evolution of Nail Clipper Monsters, to reinventing mythology (did you know the great French military leader Napoleon was a Nail Clipper Monster too?). Alongside Emily’s voiceover narration, these scenes lend a light-hearted credence to the strange premise, whilst not taking itself too seriously at the same time.
That aside, strip away these clever visual artifices and what A Nail Clipper Romance is left with is in fact a threadbare plot where nothing climacteric really happens, aside from the unfolding of Chang and Zhou’s boy-meets-girl-opposite-attracts affair in quite the cliché fashion. Even during the scenes where conflict is presented, these moments are often too touch-and-go to carry much emotional punch.
But kudos goes to seasoned actors Chang and Zhou, who do their best with what little to work with, sharing an easy, breezy chemistry that makes for a winsome romance. While Taiwanese Chang is serviceable as the sweet, sensitive boyfriend, it is Zhou who really charms as the free-spirited Emily, whose spontaneous personality is a complete foil to Sean. Exuding a natural onscreen charisma, the Chinese actress puts in a performance so unabashedly earnest that even the hardest of cynics could be convinced to accept her seemingly implausible nail-clipper-monster claims at face-value.
Despite the film’s overall frothiness, A Nail Clipper Romance does raise intriguing questions about the subjectivity of truth and the depths that unconditional love will go to. Over the course of the film, the lines between fact and fiction become increasingly blurred as Sean’s friends begin to call out the absurdity of Emily’s story, planting seeds of doubt in his mind. The most poetic lines of the film are professed by Emily, as she asserts in an earlier scene, “If you believe there is a mountain, then there is a mountain.” And as encapsulated within two quotations from the novel The Little Prince (“It is only with the heart that one can see the truth. What is essential is invisible to the eye”), the film challenges the conventional seeing-is-believing mindset: does choosing to trust in your own version of reality, even when presented with evidence otherwise, constitute a form of self-delusion? Or does it mean simply accepting that there is more than one truth to believe in?
Perhaps the message that A Nail Clipper Romance is trying to put across is that it is still a worthwhile risk to put your complete faith into something you can never be sure of, even if it means being faced with the possibility of hurt and heartbreak. And it is with this same spirit that audiences need to approach this film to fully enjoy it: to whole-heartedly throw yourself into a make-believe world where Nail Clipper Monsters exist without being seen, without doubting the sincerity of its premise.