If you noticed we review mostly hollywood made movies but we do also like asian ones. This film is called "This Is Not What I Expected" which was released way back in 2017.
A romantic comedy film by Derek Hui, starring Takeshi Kaneshiro (Lu Jin) and Dongyu Zhou (Gu Sheng Nan). The story is set in Shanghai China about Lu Jin, CEO of conglomerate that buys up hotel chains for its business. He went to the hotel where Gu Shengnan is working as chef, hoping to buy the entire hotel. Lu Jin has a particular taste in food and he is a picky eater. He throws up food if the taste doesn't suit him. He was so unsatisfied with the hotel's food that he wanted to check out already until the servers brought him a dish prepared by Gu Sheng Nan. He loved the dish so much that he stayed for a longer period of time to savor Nan's food daily. All this time, Jin doesn't know that Nan was cooking these delicious dishes served him. During start of the film, these two have not so good encounters between them so this made their situation cute. Until the time they both found out about each other.
For the love of food they worked well between them that Jin couldn't live without Nan's cooking. It came to a point that Jin would having dinner at Nan's home and even sleeping there, separately of course. During these stay overs, both emotions changed and Jin being a perfectionist would hide his emotions while Nan was starting to show signs of interest on our Jin.
To add twist to the mix, another chef was introduced andi it was Jin's personal chef for 7 years came back from vacation. A this time,Nan thought that she was special to Jin, that only her cooking was best for him. She was devastated and heart broken. To add more emotion, Jin had to fire everyone in the kitchen staff of the hotel after buying it, Nan included.
Everything changed again between the two. Nan hated Jin and Jin missed her. He asked his Dad to have breakfast with him but he did not have a great time. He then asked his personal chef of seven years to dine with him, only to be turned down. She informs him that during those 7 years of preparing food for him, she only prepares for one, for Jin only. As like all romantic films, the boy tries to find the girl and would beg for her love, which Jin did. Fast forward thereafter, girl accepts boy in the end and they lived happily ever after presumably.
The story line is cute and it had a lot of scenes that established the Mysophobia (fear of germs) and strict business attitude of our male lead in contrast to the messy and emotional life of the female lead. Bringing these two personalities and attitudes together would surely make a clash of great proportions which you will like in the movie. The eventual working out of the two will make for a cute moment or moments between the two that will surely bring a smile to the viewer.
Just don't be technical about the cooking as our female lead looked so young to be chef to be entrusted with much responsibility in the kitchen. Her acting was cute, did I say cute many times over? Yes, she is cute and she acts convincingly like a young naive woman which he portrays in the movie. Takeshi our male lead is perfect with his serious looks as our shrewd businessman. We liked his performance here but something sparked us with his features. We know we have seen him from another film and we couldn't place it while we watched this. After searching for his name, we found out where we saw him last. He was Captain Jin (same name? LOL) in "Making of House of Flying Daggers (2004). We also later found out he was in Red Cliff (2008)and Red Cliff II (2009). With these impressive credentials, he is just a match to our female Zhou also holds 34 credits as an actress and 1 for being a producer. Holding a number of credits in both movies and TV, she really impressed on us with her acting here in this movie.
We found this movie on YouTube, yes its a full movie complete with English subtitles so we included it herein for your viewing pleasure. We hope you will like it like we did.
