China Film Journal

The feature film debut of Robin Weng Shou-ming (翁首鸣), Fujian Blue follows a group of disaffected, purposeless souls who spend their time blackmailing middle-aged women and clubbing away their twenties. Such a premise somehow transforms into an absorbing narrative of deeply felt characters, a trenchant social commentary, and a tone poem to a nearly-lost generation.

In the early 1980s, Fujian became a vital hinge on the open door policy that fostered China’s economic miracle, which brought suburbs, video games, and minvans to the province. At the same time, it lured many Chinese to seek their fortune abroad, and has made Fujian a center for human trafficking, particularly the “golden triangle” of Fuqing, Changle and Pintang. Into this picture step the Neon Knights, the gang of Roppongi, Amerika, and Dragon, who capitalize on the void left by emigre husbands by catching their “remittance widows” with local lovers (sometimes one of their own), and blackmail them. Call it a Chinese version of trickle-down economics. That some knights bear nicknames reflecting their fathers’ destinations adds poignancy to this sad state of affairs.

“Neon Knights” is also the title for the movie’s first half, which focuses on Amerika and his mother, a woman involved in the local church and local trafficking operation. Bonds are already strained between mother and son – the college grad won’t get a job, hangs around bad influences. The plot picks up when he finds out she’s also taken a local lover. Amerika convinces his reluctant friends to videotape and blackmail her mom. It works, but his expressionless face at seeing his mother make the cash drop is telling. There is no victory in this game, and no joy in their decadant lives.

Mom is angry and asks “the Czech”, the local underworld leader and smuggler in Fuqing, to smoke out the extortionists. This development puts a little fright to the little gang and sends them to chill out in Pingtan. Here, for the first time, the young folks seem to enjoy themselves and their youth, riding ATVs on the beach, taking a ferry ride to visit their friend, and having sex with the local girls. One of Fujian Blue’s achievements is its street-level perspective and non-judgmental tone, which allows us to become involved with its characters, and draw us into experiencing their world as they live it, including its moments of elation and wonder.

A couple of such moments come near the end of their merry vacation from petty crime, when Amerika and a friend are visiting Dragon, who is hiding out back home for reasons of his own. On the very old and small ferry, one of them acts out the scene from Titanic where Jack Dawson (a stowaway, incidentally) is flying without wings. Later on that ferry trip, he notices a mass of Taiwanese boats, and wonders why on earth they would be here, off the coast of China. To refuel for their fishing trips, comes the ferryman’s reply. Can ships that small cross the Straits? Even smaller than this one, says the ferryman. You can picture the gears turning in Amerika’s head.

Dragon is the subject of the second half, “At Home, At Sea”. It is set in motion when the gang decides to give him the windfall from Amerika’s mom. We realize why when he returns home to his poor fishing village and family in debt for his older brother’s emigration. Dragon uses part of the illicit cash to help pay off those debts as well as support his mom and sister. The rest of it – let’s just say its fate involves an even younger group of rogues in a scene both hilarious and sad.

In an especially plangent scene, his younger sister declares during a break from school she doesn’t want to head back, but instead wants to go abroad. No, Dragon says, go back to school. They have a fight. Pretty basic stuff, but the following silence is heart-rending. How can he explain how cruel adult life can be? They compromise: she skips school that day, her brother taking her to walk along the breakwater. If the neon wilderness of Fuqing is disappointing, there are no hopes to disappoint in his homely backwater village. The price of his family’s survival may be its ultimate fracture.

Eventually, Dragon decides to go abroad and seek his fortune in the West, perpetuating the cycle of debt and desperation, but also hope and persistence in the face of a two-faced globalization that welcomes the movement of goods and ideas but is cruel to the movement of human beings, all of which it fuels. This persistence may seem absurd, when sometimes emigres leave to pay a “snakehead” for having previously smuggled their relative, or even a prior unsuccessful trip they’d taken themselves. A reference to the human-trafficking tragedy at Morecambe imbues real-life gravity to their plight. But this persistence of dreams is also a persistence of memory, of the fact that Fujianese are everywhere, making up a majority of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and the United States. It also reflects the persistence of a buccaneering spirit, reckless but not always self-destructive, which fuels both the crimes and the dreams that feed on each other. Like generations of Fujianese before them, they don’t accept their truncated roles – not in the new China of great expectations.

Several qualities make Fujian Blue a unique standout effort. Weng’s employ of non-professionals punctuates the palpable realism in every scene, whether its the young men teasing the sole woman among them in a gently sexual way, or giving running commentary on the date in their blackmail video. His use of ribald humor also anchors the characters’ authenticity – the Czech tells his card-playing friends that Czech detention wasn’t so bad because they let you watch porn. I also have to give props to the subtitles team, as I’ve never seen Chinese or any other foreign language translated as “beayotches” and “bros before hoes” (sic).

Speaking of the colloquial, yet another unique and daring feature is the liberal use of the Hokkien dialect (Fujian), which is as different from Mandarin as English is from French. Such use is both accurate (reflecting how people really speak) and illuminating (of China’s true polyglot history and sense of regional identity). Indeed, it’s mentioned that two of the gang hail from Hunan and Sichuan (which also signals that in much of China, Fujian is a placed to be envied). Finally, it is also politically and even psychologically daring to suggest that young men in Fujian (the winners of globalization, both in the world and in China) look wistfully at Taiwan. Perhaps it’s not that Fujian itself is envied, but it’s the closest to what is enviable in the world.

Along with some other features, the attitude towards the characters and their lives reminded me a bit of a breakthrough Scottish film called Trainspotting. Like that movie, we have young men and one woman, lives of petty crime and decadence, and sometime exuberance that the audience is invited to share. Even the usage of dialect lends a superficial resemblance. More likely, much of it is coincidental, or rather convergent – they share distinguishing traits of a great narrative, lightness in the face of gravity, specificity in the face of stereotype, and multiplicity in the face of dogma.

The problems they face are ultimately different, too: whereas the struggles of Scottish addicts are self-induced, that of these Fujianese rogues result largely from their legitimate though MTV-fueled dreams and the contrasting reality of their horizons. The Chinese title Jīn Bì Huī Huáng is an idiom literally meaning magnificent looking in green and gold. It is used to describe a building, or to use an English idiom word, a facade. After watching the movie at the Mill Valley Film Festival, I learned that Robin Weng is just 26. I have every hope that he will continue to seek out facades and with his remarkable vision, penetrate them.

Simultaneously overcomplicated and TV drama simple, Johnny To and Ka-fai Wai’s Mad Detective is an oddball film that is still worth a viewing, providing your sanity is firm enough to withstand enormous plot holes. In the film, Ching Wan Lau gives a charismatic performance as Inspector Bun, a police legend known for his curious detective methods. Early on in the film, we see Bun solve crimes by cutting up a dead pig and then by purposely falling down stairs while in a suitcase. His methods earn him newspaper headlines and respect, however his dramatic tendencies also put him on the outs with his squad. At a retirement party for his boss, he cuts off an ear and presents it as a gift. Before you can say ‘awkward gift choice’, Bun is forced into early retirement. But his retirement his short-lived, as a young detective seeks out Bun’s help in uncracking a cop disappearance.Mystery fans should not get too excited by a basic introduction of the film, though, as Mad Detective is not much of a who-dun-it. The culprit is pretty obvious within the first few minutes of the film, and even the inevitable plot twist near the end is clear by at least the halfway marker. And without a serious mystery to entertain us, the film then must rely on what it can do between points A and Z. In this effort, Mad Detective is a mixed bag.Most enjoyable of all, surreal images are cleverly woven into the story. Bun’s schizophrenia, or supernatural ability to see people’s true selves, allows the film to take us into very strange territory. One scene, for example, shows Bun urinating on a woman who is herself urinating into a urinal. This bizarre moment leads to a fight between Dun and the seven personalities inside the mind of another police officer. This scene, as well as others, compound in strangeness. And if the film viewer is like the characters in this film in having inner personalities, at least one of those personalities will be asking: “How can the filmmakers do that, or how can they think to do that?”But as creative as individual scenes were, they just barely make up for the film’s story problems. As we get further into the story, we find out that a missing gun plays a central point. Lost guns must be a serious problem among Hong Kong police officers, because this missing gun theme is common. It’s also something that must be taken with deathly seriousness, because characters in this film would rather kill then report a gun as lost. (That said, they don’t seem to mind lending their guns out to people who need them.) One can only hope that the actual police don’t overreact to this degree. But then once the crime is committed and covered up, what becomes more surprising are the efforts undergone to further hide the crime. The killer risks his life trying to cover his tracks, even after his tracks are sufficiently buried. In fact, the only thing that the killer could accomplish by “winning” would be to raise suspicion that he is the bad guy.Mad Detective could’ve used a re-write to fix these glaring mistakes. And while at it, writers could’ve given more work to the near-anonomous multiple personalities that make up the killer’s mind.Bottom line: check out Mad Detective for some good performances and a bunch of equally enjoyable images. Forget about the story though, as it backfires terribly.Rating: 3 out of 5 drunken iron monkeys.

As far as war films go, few films stoop as low as The Warlords,Peter Chan’s painfully stupid and unengaging post kung-fu vision starring Jet Li, Andy Lau, and Takeshi Kaneshiro. In this painful-to-watch dung heap, Li Plays a general who survives a battle that leaves the rest of his army dead. After pulling himself out from under a mound of dead bodies, he stumbles into a crumbling village where he meets up with a band of rogues, which he soon joins. Life as a bandit doesn’t work out well for him or his new comrades however, so the group joins the regular army to begin a legitimate rape and pillage career after Li and his two closest buddies swear a blood oath.

The Warlords was supposed to mark a turning point in Chinese cinema, a step toward gritty realism and away from kung-fu fantasy. And there is no reason why this attempt should’ve failed so miserably. Li had previously sworn off the fantasy pictures that made him a household name. And Chan made numerous comments about wanting to steer clear of exaggerated action.

For whatever reason, decision makers were not able to control themselves. They infuse this film with comical fantasy violence. Sword thrusts pierce bodies as though the bodies were empty plastic cola bottles, and heroes bounce around like trained acrobats. When one of them is run through with a sword, arrow, or blunt pole, the hero shows no sign of pain. Pain is nearly as uncommon for his foe, who drops dead the moment a weapon either touches him or becomes tucked under his arm pit. Thus, the film never escapes its fate as a low-grade kung-fu war film.

Still, far be it for anyone to disparage low-grade kung-fu war films. Such films have a lot of heart, a bit of philosophical insight or some fun at very least. None of these qualities can be found in this time waster. The three new amigos sack one city after another, and the film hardly slows down to explore their friendship or even their characters. Sure the three warlords stick together through thick and thin, but there doesn’t seem to be much reason for them to do so. Their friendships are never believable.

And even less comprehendable is the love interest that is even more underdeveloped and unnecessary to the story.These weaknesses would be bad enough, but The Warlords combines its awful fantasy elements and brain dead story/character development with awful melodrama to create a total offense on anyone unlucky enough to see this film. Li’s character, for example, repeatedly makes a difficult decision to betray a friendship for a greater good. And along with this decision comes a close-up of his tearful eyes. Violins begin playing. Rain falls. Then a mournful voice-over explains the tragic consequences. It’s all so laughable, and so manipulative, that it is as if the filmmakers heard a few Hollywood stereotypes and then decided to copy them.

And just to kick this dead horse one more time, I’ll add that not only is this film stupid, it is also ugly. War is presented as game and theater, a fun adventure that any healthy teenage boy would want a piece of. If the filmmakers wished to convey such a dangerous message, they could’ve at least made the film more interesting to watch.