Summary Judgement: Sizing Up Feng Xiaogang vs. Slumdog Millionaire

No other big name director captures the Chinese zeitgeist better than Feng Xiaogang. The screenwriter-and occasional actor-turned director’s filmography runs the gamut of Chinese cinematic styles – from “he sui pian” (“New Year’s Films,” a genre he is credited with inventing) to kung fu costume dramas and war epics – but it is his movies set in contemporary urban China (i.e. Cellphone, A World Without Thieves) that have proven the most popular, striking a nerve with Chinese audiences much like the the Coen Brothers and Alexander Payne (Sideways, About Schmidt) have done with North Americans.

Feng’s latest effort If You Are the One (Fei Cheng Wu Rao) stars native Beijinger Ge You as a bachelor and self-made millionaire looking for love and marriage through online personal ads. Taiwan-born actress Shu Qi plays his first blind date, a woman emotionally torn by an ill-fated affair with a married man. After a rocky start, they strike up a somewhat ambiguous “drinking buddy” friendship, a relationship that becomes increasingly entangled and complicated as the plot progresses. The screenplay builds on this nicely until halfway through when Feng rather abruptly switches gears from “quirky romantic comedy” mode to a more ambitious “existential road flick” – a transition that might have worked better with some tighter editing and less holes in the plot. The end result comes across as an ill-conceived homage to romantic neuroticism – as messy and convoluted, perhaps, as its subject matter.

One can surmise that Feng drew inspiration from Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, particularly in the Hokkaido scenes where he milks cultural misunderstandings (i.e. stumbling onto Yakuza funeral and the way-too-drawn out confessional scene in the Catholic church) for comic effect. He might have also taken a cue from Payne’s road-cum-buddy-cum-romantic-melo-comedy flick Sideways for the latter half, particularly the parts where the characters muse on the nuances of love, marriage and mid-life crises.

Of course Feng is no plagiarist – his film offers unique Chinese spins on both the romantic comedy and road flick genres, not to mention some incredibly flattering location scenes in Beijing, Haikou, Hangzhou and Hokkaido. But all this is undermined by the utterly implausible climax and denouement (and too many obvious product placement shots i.e. Motorola and Windsor Whiskey) – I will spare you the details and let you judge for yourself.

The vicissitudes of love is also the theme of another recent release, Slumdog Millionaire, directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) and based on Vika Swarup’s novel Q&A. Set in modern-day Mumbai, the story centers on Jamal (Dev Patel), an 18-year-old orphaned Muslim who, through a series of amazing circumstances, ends up on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire with a chance of winning the biggest payoff in Indian television history.

Widely lauded as (excuse the cliché) the “Feel Good Movie of the Year,” the fast paced story unfolds through a series flashbacks based on the lowly protagonist’s testimony to a skeptical police detective (Irrfan Khan) about how he came to know the answers to the quiz show’s increasingly difficult questions on the eve of the final jackpot round.

Like Feng, Boyle seems to have drawn inspiration from other directors (i.e. Fernando Meirelles’ City of God), with a good deal of his own signature stylistic flourishes thrown in. Anthony Dod Mantle’s lush cinematography incorporates a colorful mix of handheld close-ups and sweeping panoramas that make even mountains of trash look stunning. And much in the way Feng’s films depict a vibrant modern China, so too does Slumdog with Mumbai – shantytowns and all. The acting is also laudable, with the finest job done in the role of nine-year-old Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar).

But Slumdog is not without its flaws. The central theme – Jamal’s love for fellow orphan Latika (Freida Pinto) – is a stretch. The two meet as nine-year-old orphans and end up staying together in an organized child beggar brigade for just a few months (after which they become separated for almost a decade), thus it’s hard to believe that this childhood friendship would somehow endure the oft-bloody twists and turns of Jamal and his older brother (and ruffian-in-the-making) Salim’s adolescent years and turn into a life-or-death love obsession. And given that a good deal of the early scenes consists of the young orphans stealing and hustling money in some very imaginative ways, the premise that Jamal eventually appears on the game show based not on a desire for money, but a yearning to be reunited with his long lost love, is a bit much.

Ironically these are the very scenes from which the film derives much of its charm – pity that the feel-good Hollywood ending (which starts off with the police inspector releasing Jamal from custody with a curt: “The problem with you is that you are too honest!”) detracts from the earlier scenes.

That being said, Slumdog Millionaire is not a bad film (just as Feng Xiaogang’s flick is not nearly as execrable as the some of the recent works by a few of his contemporaries), but an instant classic it is not. One might even speculate over whether much of the hype behind the film is just that: a bubble of praise rooted in the movie's cinematic setting du jour. Financial crisis notwithstanding, India, as they say, is supposed to be the next China (remember all the hype surrounding The Last Emperor and Farewell My Concubine?) and it seems no small coincidence that Warner Brothers/Fox Searchlight Pictures (the international distributors) have chosen to give this film such a push at this time.

Speaking of cinematic hotspots, I’ll leave you with a preview clip (found via Shanghaiist) for what is and previously written about on tbj here, perhaps, the next big thing in cinematic fusion: Bollywood kung fu flicks.