Mermaid

美人鱼

China/Hong Kong, 2016, 1.85:1, 3-D, 94 mins.

Director: Zhou Xingchi 周星驰 [Stephen Chow].

Rating: 7/10.

Hong Kong’s Zhou Xingchi [Stephen Chow] continues his winning streak with a comic fantasy charmer.

STORY

Guangdong province, southern China, the present day. At auction, self-made trillionaire Liu Xuan (Deng Chao) buys Green Gulf, a stretch of coastline that is also a conservation area with dolphins, for over 20 billion. Liu Xuan, who has no interest in life apart from making money, has his scientists develop a sonar that will drive the dolphins away from the area so he can then develop it. He is aided and abetted in his plan by the equally ruthless Li Ruolan (Zhang Yuqi), an independently wealthy woman who is the daughter of a tycoon (Xu Ke). At a lavish party thrown by him, Liu Xuan meets Shanshan (Lin Yun) who has managed to steal in, posing as a dancer, and who tries to seduce him; thinking from her weird appearance that she’s just a prostitute, Liu Xuan has her thrown out, but not before she leaves him her number. In fact, Shanshan is a mermaid who can walk on her fins and dress in human clothes. She’s been sent by her small community that lives in a shipwreck below Guillotine Cliff in Green Gulf to trap Liu Xuan so he can be killed for his crimes against the environment. The merfolks’ wise leader, Shitai (Fan Shuzhen), considers all humans are evil. Simply as a joke to make Li Ruolan jealous, Liu Xuan calls Shanshan and invites her over; she keeps trying to kill him but without success. After trying to buy her off, Liu Xuan ends up with her at an amusement park, eating her favourite roast chicken and happily playing with her. The merfolk, led by Ba Ge, aka Octopus (Luo Zhixiang), finally trap Liu Xuan, but by then Shanshan has started to fall for him. And Liu Xuan is starting to have second thoughts about his own plans.

REVIEW

Three years after bouncing back with Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons 西游  降魔篇 (2013), Hong Kong film-maker Zhou Xingchi 周星驰 [Stephen Chow] continues his winning streak as a writer-director with Mermaid 美人鱼, which stays in the realm between fantasy and reality that Zhou has made his own. Switching from demon-hunters and mythical animals to property developers and mermaids, Zhou crafts another allegory on Buddhist co-existence that’s shot through with all his trademarks – a loose approach to narrative, plenty of space for his cast, a delight in quickfire physical gags, and a child-like innocence alongside a deep cynicism. This mixture is unique in Chinese cinema, and clearly touches a chord in Zhou’s audience. Though Mermaid feels like a much smaller, more intimate film than Journey, and its script and visual effects are often scrappy when compared with its more highly-tooled predecessor’s, the film ended up grossing almost three times as much as Journey, overtaking China’s previous all-time hit, Monster Hunt 捉妖记 (2015), in only 12 days and ending up with a box-office total of RMB3.4 billion.

That’s a staggering amount for a movie that bucks many of the trends in today’s Greater China cinema. Aside from Mainland comedian Deng Chao 邓超, it has no big names in the main roles; the visual effects have an often gleefully second-rate look; the screenplay veers hither and thither, with no sense of classical structure; and the whole film has a blatant eco-message that’s neither original nor especially subtle. But what the film does have is what so many bigger, increasingly more impersonal Chinese productions lack nowadays: an intensely personal feel, a sense of speaking directly to its audience, and a charm and sense of wonder that doesn’t feel manufactured. With his knack for puncturing pomposity and bringing a neighbourly feel to his films, Zhou hasn’t let his target audience down – and at the end of the day that’s proved a stronger draw than technical slickness. Just as the film preaches that money isn’t everything, so Zhou has proved that sheer size isn’t everything either.

After the complex, multi-character landscape of Journey, the plot of Mermaid is simplicity itself: self-made trillionaire Liu Xuan, whose only interest in life is making money, falls for Shanshan, a young mermaid whose community he’s threatened with extinction. After the briefest of main titles, Zhou pulls his first surprise: a scene of gross-out physical comedy (set in a seedy, funfair museum) whose purpose, apart from providing cameos for comic pals like Bai Ke 白客, Kong Lianshun 孔连顺 and (as the sleazy museum owner) Yang Neng 杨能, seems simply to prepare the audience for the film’s fantastic world and farcical tone. (It also forms part of the movie’s bookend structure – with the ending nailing home the eco-message with a cameo by China-born, Canada-raised singer Wu Yifan [Kris Wu] – though that’s not obvious at the start.) After that, the film also takes an unconscionable amount of time to get to the main plot, with more larking around by guest stars (Hong Kong film-maker Xu Ke 徐克 [Tsui Hark] as a tycoon, Mainland executive Zheng Jifeng 郑冀峰 as a crazed party guest) plus lots of pseudo big-business talk.

It’s all a bit like watching one of Zhou’s wúlítóu 无厘头 comedies of the 1990s. And in fact, Mermaid harks back to those “silly talk” farces – with their deliberately naff effects, carnival humour and calculated naivety – more than anything he’s directed since King of Comedy 喜剧之王 (1999). The parallel is clearest in a sequence where Shanshan and Liu Xuan emotionally bond in an amusement park over some roast chicken. And when this main plot finally gets going, it becomes a simple love story between an innocent mermaid and a ruthless businessman, with the former finally converting the latter to her eco-cause and making him “a better person”.

After the film’s discursive start, Zhou signals the start of business proper with a truly magical sequence in which Shanshan, who’s learned to dress in western clothes and walk/skateboard on her tail-fins, goes back to the wrecked ship in which her fellow merfolk live. The blend of physical antics and fantasy as she bounces and trampolines her way across a variety of physical barriers has an enchanting, cartoon-like flavour that could only have been created by one film-maker.

Side by side with all the charm lies Zhou’s parallel interest in the physically gruesome, which knows no gender boundaries: apart from the opening in the sleazy mueum, there’s an octopus-like character (played full-on by Taiwan singer-dancer Luo Zhixiang 罗志祥, the epicene prince in Journey) who ends up frying his own tentacles as a teppanyaki chef; a crone-like head mermaid who hates humankind and has an awesomely powerful tail; and all the graphic details of the merfolk’s oppression, especially in the finale in which they are ruthlessly hunted down. Stemming both from wúlítóu comedy and from Zhou’s apparent belief that good and bad, beauty and ugliness, are two sides of the same coin, this strand hasn’t been so pronounced in his work since Shaolin Soccer 少林足球 (2001).

And then there are the physical gags, in which the women, in true cartoon style, take their bumps alongside the men. A long sequence in which Shanshan tries to kill the arrogant Li Xuan at his home is pure Hong Kong slapstick, beautifully paced and not sparing the viewer’s sensitivities, and even small details (such as how the merfolk manage to travel up a waterfall) have an engaging do-it-yourself flavour.

In the role of the chief villain – one which Zhou himself would have taken in earlier days – Deng looks too young; but he brings his own screen persona to the part, especially his self-possessed scam artist in the hit The Breakup Guru 分手大师 (2014). Reportedly, it was Deng’s performance in that comedy (plus his drawing power in China) that persuaded Zhou to cast him, and Deng proves he’s as good at the small details as he is at the bigger stuff. A scene in a police station, in which his character tries to convince two sceptical cops that he was kidnapped by a mermaid, is beautifully played by him and the two guest stars, Wen Zhang 文章 and Zhou regular Li Shangzheng 李尚正.

The discovery of the film, however, is 19-year-old, Zhejiang-born newcomer Lin Yun 林允, who underplays Shanshan as much as Deng overplays the money-mad tycoon and follows a long line of Zhou heroines whose physical suffering finally triumphs over evil. It’s way too soon to assess Li’s acting skills, as her Shanshan is largely a physical role, but she holds her own in every scene she’s in. (She’s next due to appear in the summer release L.O.R.D: Legend of Ravaging Dynasties 爵迹, a fantasy by Guo Jingming 郭敬明 of Tiny Times 小时代 fame.) In the only other main female role, Zhou discovery Zhang Yuqi 张雨绮 (CJ7 长江7号, 2008) has some fun as the hammy villainess but is undermined by her squeaky voice.

Though the film’s look by Zhou’s regular technical team is often deliberately low-rent, the production design by Hong Kong veteran Yu Jia’an 余家安 [Bruce Yu] does have its moments – especially the merfolk’s watery lair inside a shipwreck at the base of a waterfall. For the record, the English subtitles do a poor job of reflecting the dialogue’s comic flavour.

CREDITS

Presented by The Star Overseas (HK), China Film (CN), Hehe (Shanghai) Pictures (CN), Beijing Enlight Pictures (CN), Shanghai New Culture Media (CN), Shanghai Zenith Culture Communication (CN), Xiangshan Zeyue Culture Communication (CN), Alibaba Pictures (CN), Alpha Pictures (Hong Kong) (CN).

Script: Zhou Xingchi [Stephen Chow], Zeng Jinchang, Lu Zhengyu, Li Sizhen, He Miaoqi, Jiang Yuyi [Ivy Kong], Feng Zhiqiang. Photography: Cai Chonghui [Johnny Choi]. Editing: Zhang Jiahui [Cheung Ka-fai], Zheng Wentao. Music: Huang Yinghua [Raymond Wong Ying-wah], Zheng Jiajia. Production design: Yu Jia’an [Bruce Yu]. Art direction: Chen Jinhe, Gao Zhuolin. Costume design: Li Bijun [Lee Pik-kwan]. Sound: Liao Jiawen. Action: Gu Xuanzhao. Visual effects: Luo Weihao (Different Digital Design). 3-D: Li Zhuguo. Choreography: Xu Xin. Executive direction: Lin Zicong, Lu Zhengyu, Qian Guowei [Wilson Chin].

Cast: Deng Chao (Liu Xuan), Luo Zhixiang (Ba Ge/Octopus), Zhang Yuqi (Li Ruolan), Lin Yun (Shanshan, mermaid), Xu Ke [Tsui Hark] (Fourth Master/Uncle Rich, Li Ruolan’s father), Wu Yifan [Kris Wu] (Long Jianfei, marine biology graduate), Wen Zhang (policeman), Li Shangzheng (policemen drawing sketches), Lu Zhengyu (Liao, Liu Xuan’s assistant), Bai Ke (museum tourist with hat), Kong Lianshun (fat female museum tourist), Zhang Mei’e (mermaid), Yang Neng (museum head), Zheng Jifeng (Zheng, crazed businessman at party), Lin Zicong (cabinet-door repairman), Tian Qiwen (heart-attack museum tourist), Qian Guowei [Wilson Chin] (passer-by), Zhao Zhiling (Long, male mermaid), Fan Shuzhen (Shitai, head mermaid), Ivan Kotik (George, mad scientist), Matsuoka Rina, Xu Zhenzhen (George’s assistants), Xia Weiyu (Maitai, mermaid), Pierre Bourdaud (auctioneer), Li Yeqing (Li Ruolan’s assistant), Sun Jialing (courier), Xu Yating (reporter), Zhao Jingyi (receptionist), Fu Junfu (rich man), Yu Jia’na (staff member at Liu Xuan’s company), Ning Xiaohua (roast-chicken stall owner), Yi Zhile (roast-chicken stall worker), Sun Letian (acquarium shop boss).

Release: China, 8 Feb 2016; Hong Kong, 8 Feb 2016.