An Innocent Mistake (2012–2013) User Reviews

Illogic Ruins Otherwise Believable Acting

[[e-mail] · 5/10 · 30 June 2020]

Director Xiang Xiu Qiong begins AN INNOCENT MISTAKE with three close female friends who discover an abandoned baby girl with a note attached to her blanket saying she could no longer care for her child. This abandoned child series begins a host of mistakes that cover the next eighteen years and sixteen episodes. There are so many errors in judgment by every one of the cast that a wave of mistakes become the motife of the series. The baby is Man Qing (Mathilde Lin) who is given unconditional love by her trio of mothers. All three mothers work as hostesses in a sleazy bar where nightly they have to sing and dance for mostly male customers. All three refuse to engage in prostitution so in their own minds they retain their self respect. The first mother is Man Yu (Xan Man Ning) who is the wisest of the three. It is she who keeps the other two as decent hardworking women. The second is Qing Xia (Lin Mei Xia) a chubby and unattractive woman who has accepted her fate that she will never marry and her only goal is to provide a loving home for Man Qing. The third is Chu Hong (Kelly Huang) a beautiful woman who knows all she has to offer a man is her body as she is more easygoing than intelligent. When Man Qing turns eighteen she wishes to go to college but one of her classmates Wei Wei (Kathy Chen) fabricates a false charge of thievery so that Man Qing believes she must resign from school in disgrace. Her mistake here is her refusal to refute the charges since the accuser is a popular Mean Girl type. The series goes off track when inexplicably she falls in love with a forty-five year old married man Da Shan (Jason Wang) whose son Yu En (Mo Tzu Yi) coincidentally falls in love with her. Complicating matters is that Wei Wei falls in love with Yu En thereby setting off a continuing conflict between the two. Then there is the Da Shan's wife Yu Jun Hui (Joy Pan) who learns of Man Qing's attraction to her husband and tries to deflect Man Qing into dating Yu En. With all these competing and crisscrossing romantic entanglements, the plot devolves into a totally unexpected late series complication which I shall not here reveal that tries mightily but fails to untangle the Gordian knot of continuous mistakes of all concerned. The chief problem with character exposition lies in Man Qing's ongoing failure to account for her choice of a man. Should she choose Da Shan whom she clearly loves but no one supports her choice or should she choose Yu En whom everyone agrees would be her logical choice. Credibility takes a final hit when the ending turns into the Taiwanese stereotypical finale of mass marriages for a forced happy ending. In AN INNOCENT MISTAKE the wrong choices are neither innocent nor mistakes but emerge as hard boiled but illogical preferences that prevent the viewer from accepting this series as a believable domestic sequence of affairs gone awry.

Novice Director, Novice actors

[zsbrz · 1/10 · 12 June 2020]

The story starts off to be a very promising drama. The "moms" are fantastic, perhaps they may be seasoned actors. The lead players either have poorly scripted lines or are unable to portray their part. Most of their acting is very wooden with long periods of silence, as if to emphasise the tension. I gave up after the 5-th episode, especially after watching the dinner scene in the restaurant's kitchen of Yu-En and Man-Ching. The moments of silence by Da-Shan when speaking to his wife is excruciatingly painful. What husband behaves that way. I couldn't bear to watch the rest... I can's see how it would rate a 7.3.