Comedy doesn’t travel well

It’s more incisive than hilarious

Sometimes humour can get lost in translation. Zhenyun Liu has adapted I Am Not Madame Bovary from his own novel, I Am Not Pan Jinlian. The title change is to give western audiences a famous adulteress they’ll recognize. (Oddly, the opening credits also give the novel’s title as I Did Not Kill My Husband.)

Bingbing Fan stars as Xuelian Li, who thinks she has concocted the perfect government scam.

She and her husband will divorce so they can qualify for singles-only apartments, then they’ll remarry. But the cad goes and marries someone else.

Now she wants to prove the divorce was a sham so she can then divorce him for real.

It sounds like a technicality, which is exactly why she gets nowhere at her local court. (It doesn’t help matters that her ex has branded her a “Pan Jinlian” for not being a virgin on their wedding night.) And so Li goes on a suing spree, working her way up the legal ladder until she gets to Beijing, and spending 10 years badgering various officials, some of whom resign rather than deal with her complaints.

Fan, a singer and actress known for more glamorous roles, is nonetheless believable as the sturdy, stubborn provincial Li. Director Xiaogong Feng also tends toward bigger fare, like the 2010 earthquake drama Aftershock, or the 2012 war picture Back to 1942.

Here, he literally squeezes the universe into a ball, shooting the scenes in the provinces through a round filter.

The effect is like watching the movie through a telescope or keyhole. In Beijing he opens things up slightly to a perfect square. (One scene features characters in the square further framed by a round doorway.) It’s a bold choice, and not nearly as distracting as one might imagine.

But the laugh-out-loud comedy some critics spoke of when the film premiered at recent Toronto International Film Festival in September was lost on this one, and perhaps he is to blame. There are figures of speech and cultural norms beyond the Pan Jinlian/Bovary dichotomy that may have fallen outside the film’s round frame.

What remains is a fascinating, Kafkaesque portrayal of justice (or lack thereof ) in modern China, but it’s no knee-slapper and, at more than two hours, it’s long for a comedy.

Though it does include a final, widescreen scene that adds an extra layer to the plot — not a happy ending, but a satisfying, bittersweet one.