Han Han’s nod to the 1990s is a sentimental journey
BEIJING: It’s been a decade of upheavals since producer Fang Li of Beijing Laurel Films sighed to the foreign press about the fate of two of his movies that enraged China’s censors for portraying a little too much real life grit.
Both Lost in Beijing ( 2007), and Summer Palace ( 2006) were barred from domestic distribution but went on to make waves overseas.
Back then, in pre- Olympics China— a long time before anybody could imagine Xi Jinping boasting to the Davos elite of China’s leadership role in globalisation—it was too soon for films like Fang’s. It was too soon for films that addressed disaffected youth and, well, youth massacred by China’s army on Tiananmen Square in 1989. Honest self-reflection was deemed potentially too destabilising.
With Duckweed, Fang is back with a more benevolent dose of mirror- gazing, couched as a time-travelling film.
Not only was it approved for release in China, it represents another feather in the cap of its director- author Han Han, from whose life screenwriter Yu Meng has cribbed some ideas.
As the film starts, rally racer Xu Tailang, or “Lang” ( Deng Chao) hurtles his souped-up Subaru through China’s gravel backroads, a visual metaphor for the pace at which megacities have pulled Chinese people from the countryside by the hundreds of millions and the Internet has launched them into semi- synch with the rest of the developed world.
But the rally car wrecks, sending Lang back in time to 1998, a pre- cell phone era of snail’s-pace, dial-up modems, and petty criminals who carry beepers as talismans of power.
Lang chases down a pursesnatcher and accidentally meets and befriends his own twentysomething father, Xu Zhengtai, or “Zheng” ( Eddie Peng). A source of shame for the grownup Lang, who really only knows him as a meek man with a colourful past, Zheng is revealed as a swaggering local Robin Hood figure who will, before film’s end, go to jail fighting off a crooked real estate developer just as Lang is born to his mother and snapped back to the future.
Duckweed presents a coming-of-age tale, in which an adult child is surprised to find compassion taking root for a father he has hated while growing up when he is dropped into that very father’s own misspent youth. Lang tails his dad, passing as an oddly- styled stranger who claims to be a local even though no one’s ever heard of him. Together with his followers, Ma the computer nerd ( Dong Zijian) and Liu Yi the loyal, if simple, enforcer ( Zack Gao), Zheng runs a gang he claims to model after the legendary 1920s Shanghai mob boss, Big Ears Du Yuesheng.
Zheng wants to slow the rapid pace of change in their small town. He runs a protection racket he takes as a moral obligation: in his feud with a rival hood, he’s the guy who wants to shield the young local ladies at the karaoke joint from being pressed into the lucrative flesh trade, and who wants the bath house to remain “just for bathing.” Zheng rescues Ma from a botched kidnapping, but he and Liu Yi sneer at Ma’s plans to write a computer software to facilitate real time communication among the masses.
Over noodles that same night, Lang and Ma know differently. Ma’s given name is Pony, and Pony Ma, for readers unfamiliar with the founder of China’s largest Internet company, Tencent, will go on to develop the first instant messaging platform in China ( ICQ) and evolve it into today’s WeChat, a Twitterlike app that boasts more than one billion active accounts worldwide.
“You don’t belong here.” Lang tells Ma. “Time to go.”