Overall Planning
日不落酒店
China, 2021, colour, 2.35:1, 105 mins.
Directors: Feng Yiping 冯一平, Liu Junmeng 刘峻萌, Hao Xinyue 郝心悦.
Rating: 4/10.
Eccentric comedy set in an old hotel hits a creative brick wall two-thirds of the way through.
STORY
Somewhere in southern China, the present day. After 10 years as duty manager at the Sun Will Never Set Hotel 日不落酒店, obsessive control freak Shi Yue (Huang Cailun) is transferred against his wishes to the group’s huge main hotel as lobby manager co-ordinating seven other managers. At the same time Shi Yue’s wife, Li Juzi (Zhang Huiwen), tells him she’s pregnant. Both these developments are not part of Shi Yue’s meticulously detailed 10-year plan. Having never taken a day’s holiday in the past decade, he’s given a day off before starting his new post. The night before, Li Juzi wins a lottery prize for a one-night star-gazing holiday for two and she persuades Shi Yue to go on it. When they arrive at the hotel the next day, it turns out to be the Sun Will Never Set. Because the staff – bellboy Shen Mo (He Zijun)), cook (Tao Liang) and waitress Xiaoqian (Zhang Yezi) – think Shi Yue has already been transferred, the hotel is a complete mess, and they try to get rid of him by claiming all the rooms are booked. Shi Yue finds a disused office-cum-storeroom, Room 04, and they stay there, having a rest before dinner. Shi Yue has a dream of leaving the room, meeting a mute alien called Paper Man (Shen Teng), and not being able to return to the room as the door has disappeared. He wakes up to find Li Juzi gone and when he goes outside the same thing happens. Deciding to get in by the window ledge, he goes to the next room, 104, where he meets a scriptwriter, Qiao (Liu Beishi), who has an actress, Xixi (Gao Ye), tied up in the bath and the unconscious body of a man on the floor. Qiao tries to frame Shi Yue for the situation, but then Shi Yue wakes up and realises it’s another nightmare. When the alien makes the door vanish again, Shi Yue tries the next room along, 204, where a young couple, Xiaohong (Sun Zhenni) and her boyfriend Lan (Zhang Chen), are pretending they’re in Fiji while skyping her parents (Kou Zhenhai, Chen Wei). In the next room along, 304, Shi Yue finds a man (Li Weihe) who’s about to jump out of the window while pursued by an American contract killer (Kenan Heppe). After dinner downstairs, Shi Yue and Li Juzi do some star-gazing on the terrace, where he tells her the stories of the people in the three adjoining rooms. She agrees to accompany him when he decides to sort out the guests’ problems, and they convince the three staff to come with them.
REVIEW
Overall Planning 日不落酒店 is one of those films that probably sounded very funny in the planning and writing but suddenly hits a brick wall two-thirds of the way through and stops being amusing at all. The second starring role for Huang Cailun 黄才伦 – a member of the Beijing comedy troupe Ma Hua FunAge 开心麻花 – after the entertaining farce Hello, Mrs. Money 李茶的“姑妈” (2018), it’s less of an ensemble piece, despite having a sizeable cast, and more dependent on Huang himself, here playing an OCD freak only a couple of notches down from the lead character in hit comedy Warm Hug 温暖的抱抱 (2020), released at the end of last year. The problem with the film, however, lies not with Huang but with the script by the three first-time directors, Feng Yiping 冯一平, Liu Junmeng 刘峻萌 and Hao Xinyue 郝心悦, all of whom hail from the theatre and seem to have no idea of the different dynamics involved in a feature film. Shot in spring 2018, and finally released three years later, it only managed a weedy RMB20 million at the Mainland box office.
Of the creative trio, Feng, now 38, has directed stage productions, Liu has written and produced theatre works (including with Ma Hua FunAge), and the youngest, Qingdao-born Hao, 29, a graduate of Beijing’s Central Academy of Drama, has worked as an assistant director and actress. Born in Liaoning, northeast China, Huang, 35, signed with Ma Hua FunAge in 2009 and has had experience in writing, acting and directing for the stage; on the film side, he was in supporting roles until repeating for the big screen his original stage role in Mrs. Money – a farce on greed and conspicuous consumption, loosely based on the UK stage classic Charley’s Aunt, in which Huang spent a lot of the time in drag.
Though not actually a Ma Hua FunAge production, Overall Planning has the slight feel of one, down to the guest appearance of Ma Hua stalwart Shen Teng 沈腾 as a weird, mute alien called Paper Man 纸片人 (which sounds very close to the Chinese for “producer” 制片人, hahaha). It also has the feel a stage production: almost entirely set in an old, baroque-style hotel, with people popping in and out of rooms, it might have worked in a theatre, but on a cinema screen it seems to go nowhere except round in circles. Huang plays Shi Yue, a man whose whole life is meticulously planned but is then thrown into chaos by (a) a sudden job transferral and (b) his wife announcing she’s pregnant; in the day off he gets between jobs, he ends up back in the hotel he’s managed for 10 years on an overnight break won in a lottery. Thinking he’d gone for ever, the staff have let the place run to seed and try to get rid of him; but then Shi Yue starts seeing an alien cut-out who keeps locking him out, and then finds various strange goings-on in the adjacent rooms – a scriptwriter and an actress in 104, a young couple pretending to be in Fiji in 204, and a suicidee and an American contract killer in 304.
If that all sounds weird but familiar, another eccentric hotel comedy, it is; and it plays in a tolerably amusing way like that for the first hour. But just when the Paper Man joke and the various room stories are starting to become repetitive, the film hits a creative wall. Shi Yue tells his wife what’s been happening while she’s been asleep, and she agrees to accompany him as he returns to the rooms and sorts each situation out, with the help of the three staff as well. This replay of the previous half-hour is nowhere near as amusing the second time round, and seems to have no basis in Shi Yue’s character, apart from a desire to bring order to the universe for the sake of it.
Try as he may, Huang can’t bring much else to his role of the OCD obsessive and, though in her perkiest role to date, ballet dancer-turned-actress Zhang Huiwen 张慧雯 (the daughter in Coming Home 归来, 2014; high-school lead in Crying Out in Love 在世界中心呼唤爱, 2016) also remains unchanged throughout, a kind of pert, wide-eyed version of Huang’s character. The large number of supporting roles are capably filled, within their tightly written limits. Art direction by Chen Weiren 陈为任 (Love Contractually 合约男女, 2017) and widescreen photography by Cheng Ma Zhiyuan 程马志远 (Duckweed 乘风破浪, 2017; Lost, Found 找到你, 2018) are both characterful for the old hotel but the ugly rock score by Zhao Lijie 赵力杰 is a constant irritation. The film’s Chinese title is the name of the place, “Sun Will Never Set Hotel”.
CREDITS
Presented by Huawen (Beijing) Pictures (CN), Hangzhou VCI Media (CN), Chongqing Film Group (CN), Shanghai Melsense Media (CN), Baifu Pictures (Tianjin) (CN), Zhejiang Taro Entertainment (CN). Produced by Beijing Yunhefeiyang Culture Communication (CN).
Script: Feng Yiping, Liu Junmeng, Hao Xinyue. Photography: Cheng Ma Zhiyuan. Editing: Zhu Yanfei. Music: Zhao Lijie. Art direction: Chen Weiren. Costumes: Xing Maiyan. Styling: Lei Shuyu. Sound: Qin Shengwen, Zhao Fangling. Action: Wang Xinfeng, He Changjing. Special effects: Guo Guanyu. Executive direction: Gao Yubin.
Cast: Huang Cailun (Shi Yue), Zhang Huiwen (Li Juzi, Shi Yue’s wife), Gao Ye (Xixi, actress), Sun Zhenni (Xiaohong), Zhang Yezi (Xiaoqian, hotel waitress), Tao Liang (hotel cook), He Zijun (Shen Mo, hotel bellboy), Tao Hai (Teng Ben/Problem Solver), Liu Beishi (Qiao, scriptwriter), Zhang Chen (Lan, Xiaohong’s boyfriend), Li Weihe (Duan, suicidee), Lamuyangzi [Li Jiaqi] (Yoko, delivery girl), Kenan Heppe (American contract killer), Zhang Xin (Zhang Xin), Shen Teng (Paper Man), Yu Xiaoming (producer), Kou Zhenhai (Xiaohong’s father), Chen Wei (Xiaohong’s mother), Zhang Weixun (bus driver), Jiang Yiran (tour guide).
Release: China, 19 Mar 2021.