The Chef The Actor The Scoundrel

厨子戏子痞子

China, 2013, colour/b&w, 2.35:1, 107 mins.

Director: Guan Hu 管虎.

Rating: 9/10.

WW2 comedy-drama, centred on a Beijing inn, is richly packaged and expertly played.

STORY

Beiping (modern-day Beijing), autumn 1941. The Japanese-occupied city is riven with a cholera epidemic and is under quarantine, with a 6 p.m. curfew. A masked ruffian (Huang Bo), dressed like a cowboy, attempts to rob a carriage in which two Japanese are travelling – Sugai Shinichi (Takashima Shinichi) and Ogasawara Goro (Otsuka Masanobu) – but the carriage crashes. Entering a deserted Japanese restaurant nearby, run by an effeminate chef (Liu Ye) and his crazed, mute wife (Liang Jing), the ruffian finds the two Japanese tied up. The chef and his wife are hostile, as too is a veteran opera performer (Zhang Hanyu) who works there, and all four start arguing over a seemingly valuable metal canister that is chained to Ogasawara’s wrist. The argument is interrupted by the arrival of three detectives (Wang Xun, Fei Zhenxiang, Zhao Suchen), from whom the chef and his wife hide their two captives and the canister while the place is searched. After the detectives have left, and the curfew comes into place, the four discover that the canister holds a flask of blue liquid marked “cholera bacteria”, being transported from Manchuria to Beiping to help treat the outbreak that has infected over 1 million people in northern China. The two captives are biochemists from Unit 731 – a germ-warfare research centre set up in Manchuria by the Japanese army that is the source of the epidemic – who have come to develop a vaccine. Their four captors realise they can potentially make a lot of money from their discovery and start bickering again. But all is not as it seems. In fact, the four are all highly skilled Chinese secret agents who have three days to get the secret of the vaccine from their captives. Realising the Japanese will not give in to torture, they try to trick them into revealing the formula by putting on a masquerade. But what they don’t know at first is that the virus has already mutated. Meanwhile, the three suspicious detectives have put the restaurant under surveillance, and then a Japanese army captain, Igarashi (Minowa Yasufumi), tired after searching for the missing biochemists, drops by for his favourite meal of blowfish.

REVIEW

A richly packaged, expertly played comedy-drama that keeps springing twists until almost the last frame, The Chef The Actor The Scoundrel 厨子戏子痞子 isn’t what it seems in more ways than one. Though the title echoes South Korean action extravaganza The Good The Bad The Weird 좋은 놈, 나쁜 놈, 이상한 놈 (2008), as well as Mainland costume comedy The Butcher, the Chef and the Swordsman 刀见笑 (2010), it has neither the wide-open-spaces spectacle of the former nor the exotic, sweaty comedy of the latter. Instead, it’s a complexly plotted piece of theatre, cast in strength, that continuously morphs in interesting ways: part knockabout comedy, part serious spy movie, part tribute to “the films of our childhood” (as a final title notes), it will also go down in movie history as the first comedy about germ warfare.

Set in Japanese-occupied Beijing during WW2, Chef has a strong whiff of one of the early, little-known movies of director Guan Hu 管虎 – Goodbye! Our 1948 再见，我们的1948…… (1999, aka Children of the Crusade and Farewell 1948) – in its Northern grit, plucky acting and idealistic, almost childlike coda. Chef, however, is realised on a much more lavish scale, from the leaf-strewn autumnal street sets to the inn where so much of the action is played out. Beautifully designed by Zhao Hai 赵海 (1911, 2011) like a Chinese teahouse that’s been taken over by Japanese props, and resonantly photographed by ace d.p. Du Jie 杜杰 (Crazy Stone 疯狂的石头, 2006; Wind Blast 西风烈, 2010; Taichi Zero 太极1  从零开始, 2012) in moods reflecting the shifts in drama, the inn is the main stage on which a elaborate game is played out between four Chinese and their two Japanese captives as the Nipponese enemy gather outside in the plague-ridden city.

The game that Guan, a director who moves between TV drama and movies like Dirt 头发乱了 (1994) and Cow 斗牛 (2009), and co-writer Dong Runnian 董润年 (from TV drama) also play with the audience is a long-limbed, chancy one, and in the first 20 minutes seriously risks emptying the cinema. Starting with a cowboyish action sequence that directly evokes spaghetti western classic The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il buono il brutto il cattivo, 1966), Guan follows that with an over-acted section that raises memories of his previous film, village comedy Design of Death 杀生 (2012), a much lesser work that also starred goofy prankster Huang Bo 黄渤 (Crazy Stone; Cow; Lost in Thailand 人再囧途之泰囧, 2012). But as the story flashes back “five hours earlier”, the tone abruptly changes and the viewer realises that almost everything to that point was not what it appeared to be.

As competing parties dissimulate in a confined space, the 40-minute second act becomes a beautifully choreographed riff on the classic Beijing Opera setpiece Fork in the Road 三岔口, which itself inspired classic “Chinese inn films” from Dragon Gate Inn 龙门客栈 (1967) and The Fate of Lee Khan 迎春阁之风波 (1973) by Hu Jinquan 胡金铨 [King Hu] to Flying Swords of Dragon Gate 龙门飞甲 (2011) by Xu Ke 徐克 [Tsui Hark] and even A Simple Noodle Story 三枪拍案惊奇 (2009) by Zhang Yimou 张艺谋. The final act broadens the arena to include the streets outside and, as the Japanese military surrounds the place, the twists continue to pile high, with games played with secret messages and morse code.

What keeps Chef bubbling, when it could so easily have curdled in its own juices, is the inventive script, the top-flight cast and Guan’s command of mood. Though it initially seems scatter-gun and random, the screenplay ticks like a Swiss watch, with not one element (even a blowfish meal) that doesn’t play a part as the plot rewinds itself to show scenes from a different perspective. Guan also knows when to rein back on the goofy stuff, such as a brief but moving farewell between two characters that later plays into the equally moving coda.

But it’s the casting that clinches the film’s success, with male leads Zhang Hanyu 张涵予, Huang and Liu Ye 刘烨 (all doubling as executive producers) and female lead Liang Jing 梁静 (Guan’s wife) playing in perfect ensemble, both comic and serious. The first act deliberately goes out of its way to throw the viewer: Zhang prancing around as a louche Peking Opera artiste, squawking out his lines, Huang doing his usual goofy shtick in a thick Shandong accent, Liu as an effeminate “Japanese” chef, and Liang hiding behind a mouthful of teeth (as in Design) and geisha-like clothing as a crazed, mute proprietress. But as the plot thickens, and the actors switch between roles, they also evolve as believable characters within the fantastic boundaries of the whole movie.

Playing by the Japanese cast – largely actors who’ve worked regularly in China or Taiwan – is also fine, especially Minowa Yasufumi 美浓轮泰史 as a blowfish-loving captain, Otsuka Masanobu 大冢匡将 as a scornful biochemist, and actress Tanaka Chie 田中千绘 as a communications specialist. The score by Dou Peng 窦鹏 starts jokily (using bouzouki music and classical gobbits) but is not always ideal in the later action (using funky rock). However, editing by the versatile Kong Jinlei 孔劲蕾 is excellent throughout, adjusting its rhythm to Guan’s direction.

According to the film’s postscript, the main characters are based on real people, all students at the pre-war Yenching [Yanjing] University in Beijing: the “chef” was Liu Zuming 刘祖鸣 (1914-95), the “actor” Zhou Yitong 周一桐 (1909-76), the “scoundrel” Li Fangzhi 李芳之 (1913-84) and the proprietress Wu Hongying 武红英 (1912-95). Though it’s only referred to and not shown in Chef, Japan’s germ-warfare research Unit 731 was gruesomely portrayed in the schlocky Hong Kong production Man behind the Sun 黑太阳731 (1988, aka Black Sun 731) by Mainland-born, Taiwan-raised director Mou Dunfei 牟敦芾.

After shooting, the film set was used for an unrelated 40-part TV drama, Troubled Times Three Brothers 火线三兄弟, also starring Zhang, Huang and Liu, partly directed by Guan Hu, but with a different crew. The WW2 resistance drama began airing in June 2013.

CREDITS

Presented by Produced by Section Five Movement (CN), Enlight Pictures (CN). Produced by Beijing Seventh Image Movie & Media (CN), Beijing SanGui International Media (CN).

Script: Guan Hu, Dong Runnian. Photography: Du Jie. Editing: Kong Jinlei. Music: Dou Peng. Production design: Zhao Hai. Art direction: Wang Chaohui. Costume design: Liang Tingting, Hou Jingli. Sound: Zhao Suchen, Wang Gang. Action: Fu Xiaojie. Special effects: Jin Yang. Visual effects: Zhou Yanchun (Illumina). Second unit directors: Shim Jae-won, Chen Guanlong. Second unit photography: Shi Sheng. Choreography: Cui Pengke, Liu Yibo, Zhang Xu. Opera instruction: Fei Zhenxiang. Executive direction: Wang Bing.

Cast: Zhang Hanyu (The Actor), Huang Bo (The Scoundrel), Liu Hua (The Chef), Liang Jing (The Proprietress), Chie Tanaka (Yanagida Sakura, second lieutenant), Wang Xun (chief detective), Zhang Luyi (Shirakawa, Igarashi’s sidekick), Minowa Yasufumi (Igarashi, captain), Takashima Shinichi (Sugai Shinichi, lieutenant, biochemist), Otsuka Masanobu (Ogasawara Goro, colonel, biochemist), Fei Zhenxiang (Erqiu, second detective), Zhao Suchen (Sanpao, third detective), Hibino Akora (Japanese general), Kohata Ryu (Japanese commander).

Release: China, 29 Mar 2013.

(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 8 Jul 2013.)