The year 2013 will be remembered for the spectacular takeoff of China's film market, and it will also go down in history as the year bad movies ruled, or at least shared, the box office and public consciousness as often as, if not more frequently than, good ones. Here is the result of painstaking scavenging for something valuable from a big pile of cinematic fluff and trash.
No Man's Land
After spending four years in censorship limbo, Ning Hao's dark tale of man at his most animal phase finally sees the light of day. The final three-minute scene is so obviously a change for compromise it should be ignored by sharp-eye cinephiles.
An ambitious lawyer travels to China's hinterland to defend a hard-boiled criminal and gets him off on a technical loophole. On his way back to the big city, he passes a 500-kilometer stretch of "no man's land" where any trace of law and ethics evaporate like water in the desert. He encounters a posse of colorful types, including his former client. They are all bad guys, but so indelible in portrayal the exaggeration becomes fun. The lawyer awakens to the vestige of humanity lying dormant in himself and takes a fatal diversion from his relentless pursuit of fame and fortune.
When Xu Zheng and Huang Bo made this Chinese Western back in 2009, they were emerging stars. Now, one has helmed the country's highest-grossing movie (Lost in Thailand) and the other has firmly established himself as China's best thespian in both comedy and drama. The movie has grossed north of 200 million yuan ($33 million).What poetic justice!
Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons
Stephen Chow elevated himself into a realm of movie gods when his 1994 A Chinese Odyssey became the equivalent of the United Kingdom's Monty Python a cross college campuses in China. Chow's retake on the Monkey King story is a 3-D exercise in unalloyed adventure and typical Chow-style humor. This time, it does not have much room for reinterpretation or tea-leaf analysis.
The movie cuts a very thin slice from the literary classic, i.e. the coming together of the three disciples of the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) monk before they embark on their epic expedition to India, but imbues it with a rich tapestry of details. The three parts vary in tone and length, but who cares? The fun is non-stop and it's closer to Stephen Chow than to Wu Cheng'en the author of the book, even though Chow worked only behind the camera as the director.
Finding Mr. Right
Don't be fooled by the generic title. The Chinese title, When Beijing Meets Seattle, is so much more telling and titillating. A romantic comedy set largely in Seattle but shot in Vancouver, with a few brief scenes in Beijing and New York, it is a tribute to Sleepless in Seattle more than a half-bake remake, with more cynicism of a gilded age.
A Chinese woman is sent by her married and obscenely wealthy boyfriend to the United States to give birth. While there, she very slowly falls for a decent divorced man and rediscovers the values she has given up for material gains. As a tightly structured love story that closely follows Hollywood genre conventions it is backed up with nuanced Chinese ways of communication. But the exotic locale adds to the international feel which is deceptive as it is a pure Chinese production an became the biggest sleeper hit of the year.
Silent Witness
H alf courtroom drama, half suspense, this study in genre filmmaking is tautly woven but based on an imaginary legal framework. In other words, it is not realistic, but is built on an assumption. Once you accept that, you'll be able to enjoy the twists in the plot and the motivations of every character.
The teenager daughter of a rich businessman is widely suspected of killing her father's pop-singer girlfriend. The truth peels off one layer at a time, until we come face to face with the possibility that there is a bigger power at play than law, something that touches us in fundamental ways. The three leads deliver immaculate performances and writer-director Fei Xing exhibits a maturity that belies his newcomer status.
The Love Songs of Tiedan
Hao Jie's second feature suffers the fate of a typical art-house film, which means sinking at the box office without even a ripple. His debut film Single Men (2010) was a breakout garnering a basket of international awards but never attempted to gain approval for domestic release. As such, it did not need to remove the naughty edges that might have rankled the censors.
In both movies, Hao displays the curiosity of a teenage boy who is just discovering the wonders of sex. Tiedan is an adolescent who falls for a much older neighbor and, years later, her daughters. The story is very fluent and full of bawdy humor, yet it lacks the small details that make Single Men so refreshing. There is no ideology in either movie, but someone growing out of puberty is not really a subject everyone is comfortable with, and the story is hard to tell well under the circumstances.
Young Style
Art-house auteur Liu Jie takes a swerve toward commercial cinema, but stops at the mid-point. He fills this coming-of-age story with jokes, but insists on casting non-professional in all the roles except the female teacher. Qin Hailu gets a bunch of hilarious lines admonishing her students to work tirelessly toward the holy grail for every Chinese high-school student, namely passing the all-important national entrance exam and enrolling in a prestigious university. Here is one: "Sacrifice yourself for the happiness of all your family".
Liu pushes the envelope by dwelling on a teenager's fixation on pursuing his love interest, which is a big no-no under current guidelines of movie content. But he dodges the bullets by having the romance as the cause for the protagonists' academic failure hence turning the story into a cautionary tale. Dong Zijian, son of China's super-agent in the entertainment industry, did not disappoint his mother, or the audience. It's a very auspicious debut for an insider.
Apart Together
Wang Quan'an won a Silver Bear award for best screenplay at the 2010 Berlin International Film Festival for this film. For whatever reason it did not premiere in China until 2013 - "without any cut or revision" explains the filmmaker - and stil failed to garner any significant box-office return.
A dexterous account of a newly-married Shanghai couple who were separated in 1949 in the maelstrom of political upheavals the family drama is full of subtlety punctuated by occasional bursts of funny melodramatic turns. It features natural dialogue and top-notch performances all round, especially Lisa Lu and Ling Feng, who play the reunited couple. However, it doe not offer a dramatic climax or any obvious message, political or otherwise, leaving many filmgoers perplexed about the moral of the story. On the plus side, it gives you plenty of room for philosophizing.
Drug War
Hong Kong's reigning king of the gangster genre Johnnie To resisted entering the mainland market for a long time. When he finally did, he did not make too many concessions. As a matter of fact, this film, set and made in the mainland and financed by mainland money, served to widen the boundaries of what a crime drama can depict on mainland screens.
Not only are the drug-taking scenes realistically portrayed, but the heroic cop is more three-dimensional than most characters in this genre. The weakness, this time, lies in the antagonist, the Hong Kong drug-make who gets caught in the opening sequence. The director maintains his fast pacing and his signature violence is also intact, but the story leaves something to be desired in psychological depth.
So Young
Zhao Wei's directorial debut is a commercial smash, bringing in 700 million yuan at the box office, but it is only three quarters of a good movie. The first 100 minutes, set in a 1990s college campus, are characterized by fluency and even poignancy. The love story is redolent of the era and its quirks. The female lead, an unknown, reminds one of Zhao's breakout TV role Little Swallow, insistent and tomboyish and full of irresistible charm.
Fast forward a decade when the group of college buddies reunite and, strangely, continue their unfinished love threads. This part turns melodramatic and wildly uneven in tone. It's as if it were made by a different person or lifted from a different movie, a most disappointing coda to an otherwise perfect paean to the good old days.