Kelly Chen in "Lost and Found"

Kelly Chan Wai-Lam was the perfect actress to play Lam, the lead in Lost and Found and it was the perfect movie for an actress of her looks, talent and emotional range. Lost and Found hits the audience with successive waves of pathos and bathos, each more fierce than the last, demanding that we succumb to its "Love means never having to say you are an actress" gestalt. Which is not to say it is a bad movie--it is a very good three handkerchief weeper that charts the life and loves of a sublimely lovely woman who is stricken with cancer and who gets more beautiful as the disease progresses. Add the gorgeous Kaneshiro Takeshi fighting back tears, a child bravely mourning her mother and an all but homeless (although still cute, clean and funny) family of kids trying to stay together and only the hardest heart will keep from breaking.

Kelly Chan's narrow emotional compass and lack of connection with the other actors in the movie serve her well. Lam would be present physically to her friends and family but her mind/soul/spirit is busy as a subject of the Kingdom of Cancer so Chan's lack of affect is exactly what is called for.

First and most importantly she plays a person dying in the hospital:

Still dying and not happy about it:

And dying some more:

But it isn't all wasting away against the dark peach sheets of the hospital. What she does best as a ravishingly beautiful performer is simply look at the camera:

But part of shooting a movie with Kelly Chan is to make sure she varies her expression to the extent she can, something which director Lee Chi-Ngai didn't do. Here she is with Kaneshiro Takeshi. He looks shocked and surprised while she looks like she (almost) always does:

There is a shot of her eavesdropping on a tragic phone conversation:

And another of her on the craggy, wind-swept highlands of Scotland where she has gone in search of what she thinks is her true love (but we know it isn't, since it is Michael Wong):

In case the audience hasn't surrendered after watching Kaneshiro Takeshi stay dewy-eyed and noble for the entire movie (he has eyes that rival Bambi's for expressiveness) Lee, who wrote and produced Lost and Found as well as directing it, brings out the biggest of big guns at the end. Lam, still as exquisite and inexpressive as she was when she was alive, gets to observe her own funeral and see how her life and death have brought together those who knew her:

What works best, though, is exactly why this movie was cast the way it was--the face that may not have launched a thousand ships but has sold a lot of tickets: