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A rom-com centred on a man who runs a "love bank" where couples can "deposit" video valentines, Love Deposit makes pleasant enough viewing thanks to its performances. Not normally one\'s first choice for a romantic comedy lead, Xia Yu is actually pretty good here, despite being equipped with a unsuitable moustache and goatee to give him a beachcomber look. The revelation, however, is 25-year-old model-actress Jessie Zhou, in her first lead role in a film: averagely dressed and lightly made up for most of the time, Zhou, who\'s already done some interesting work in TV dramas, shows a gift here for romantic comedy, as well as a natural big-screen presence that doesn\'t rely on clothes or glamour.
The first half hour — in which Xiaoyu , disappointed in love, tries to get her video valentine back from "love bank" manager Muyang — is basically an over-complicated way of getting the two leads to meet cute and then spend time together. En route there are some funny sequences which build their odd-couple chemistry, especially one set in a coffee bar where Muyang makes her pay for RMB2,000 worth of drinks, but the real story only starts at the 30-minute mark, as Xiaoyu takes a job as a waitress at Muyang\'s cafe. What\'s nice about Love Deposit is its free sense of structure — a diversion about an old couple who deposit valentines or a robbery of a nearby ATM are casually dropped in — which reflects not only Muyang\'s attitude towards life but also the laidback, seaside setting around Qingdao. In the same way, the romance between Muyang and Xiaoyu develops in an easy, offhand way that\'s quite unformulaic.
The problem is that when, the film starts getting more serious and introduces the cliche of the "old girlfriend" in an attempt to fill out Muyang\'s character. The final half-hour — which puts Muyang\'s past under the microscope and basically gets rid of Xiaoyu for a while to do so — pulls itself together for a feel-good ending thanks to Jill Hsu .
The summery seaside setting, in a quiet surbub of Qingdao, is relaxedly caught in the photography of Wang Hu , and other technical credits are okay without being rom-com super-slick. As it loosely stands, Love Deposit is more a romance with comic elements than a true rom-com.