Romancing in Thin Air 2012

During an onstage moment after receiving an acting award, Hong Kong screen god Michael Lau Louis Koo proposes to his mainland co-star, Ding Yuanyuan Gao Yuanyuan. At the paparazzi-packed wedding reception, the bride runs away with her first love, coal miner Zhang Xing Wang Baoqiang.

Michael spirals into an alcoholic haze and ends up tumbling into the back of a truck bound for Shangri-La County, a remote corner of northwest Yunnan. There, at the Deep Woods Hotel—a ranch-style guesthouse perched 3,800 metres up in the mountains—the lovelorn star falls seriously ill with altitude sickness and is nursed back to health by the owner Sue Sammi Cheng Sau-Man and the local doctor Tien Niu. Sue, once an art student from Hong Kong who worked in China during her studies, fell in love with the place and with the guesthouse’s enigmatic owner, Yang Xiaotian Li Guangjie. Seven years earlier, Xiaotian ventured into the surrounding forest to rescue a young boy and never returned. Hoping he might still be alive, Sue continues to run the retreat with two assistants.

As Michael recovers, he learns that Sue was an early member years ago of his international fan club, a detail that tugs at old memories. A flashback reveals a parallel romance in which Michael helped bring Yang and Sue together, and the two reconnect in a quiet, evolving bond. Yet the present tense calls for answers, and Michael’s manager Barbara Huang Yi remains anxious, tracing his every move from afar. Then a raggedy rucksack belonging to Xiaotian is found in the forest, renewing Sue’s fragile hope that her husband might still be alive and out there somewhere beyond the trees. The film patiently threads together fame, memory, and longing against a stark, windswept mountain backdrop, inviting viewers to follow how past and present intertwine in a place where time seems to stand still.