China Film Journal

We saw this movie in the theater, in Paris, which it seems is one of the only places where this movie could be seen on the big screen other than at film festivals. The film is actually from a few years back, but was never shown in China, and while we think there are probably DVDs floating around, we can’t say that we’ve seen any of them.
The film is about a down and out Guizhou woman living in Beijing who ekes out a living for herself and deadbeat husband by selling DVDs. When her husband gets in trouble with the law and ends up behind bars, it’s up to her to find out how to bail him out. She goes back to Guizhou and ends up, with a former lover, setting up a funeral crying business, meaning that she gets paid to cry and mourn at funerals (this is supposed to bring some dignity and prestige to the deceased and their family).

The film is definitely of the wry and often none-too-subtle social commentary genre, but is still a comedy, of sorts, which is nice. There are times when their barbs are a bit too obvious, as with the prison warden who professes ideals of crime, punishment but is will not refuse a woman who offers him a quickie in the office. However, the film on the whole moves quite nicely, never bogging down, telling the story simply and effectively.

The Time Out review was pretty positive, as was the one we found on efilmcritic.com Some Chinese people who watched it recently in Paris seemed to like the film as well. However, the film was banned in China (there are maybe two sex scenes in the movie, none of them too raunchy for our tastes), and from a 2006 post from Simonworld, it seems that the director of the film, Liu Bingjian (刘秉鉴), has gone into …. selling men’s beauty products for Amway instead, which, if true, is a sad commentary on the state of Chinese art cinema.

Luckily for you, especially those of you in China, the entire movie is available in the video above.

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So you might have heard that Jackie Chan recently went to Australia to bury his father, who died of cancer at the age of 93.Well, what you might not have known is that Jackie Chan’s father Charlie, aka Fang Daolong, had a whole other family (Jackie’s mother was his second wife) that he lost touch with and then had to leave behind in 1949. There was an article called “Enter the Parents” written a few years ago that gave some of the background. The video above covers some of the same ground, but was made more recently, as it mentions the thorny issue of why Jackie doesn’t want to get in touch with his half-brothers Fang Shisheng and Fang Shide, especially when their father died and there was a funeral to attend. The interviews also broach the question of whether or not they are revealing their identities so openly now in hoping of getting some of Jackie’s (and his father’s) money. To this question they reply that it would be a lie to say that they aren’t hoping for some help (university tuition, jobs for the young uns) but are NOT coveting Jackie’s wealth. The video is in Chinese.