All about My Mother

关于我妈的一切

China, 2021, colour, 2.35:1, 118 mins.

Director: Zhao Tianyu 赵天宇.

Rating: 5/10.

Vehicle for veteran actress Xu Fan is a predictable cancer tear-jerker crossed with a daughter-mother melodrama.

STORY

Northern China, the present day, 30 Sep. Li Xiaomei (Zhang Jingyi) works as a lowly production assistant at a company in Beijing that produces TV shows. She’s felt dominated and controlled by her mother, Ji Peizhen (Xu Fan), all her life and, even though her mother still lives in Qingdao city, 500 kilometres away, she still feels under her thumb. When her married lover Zheng Yi (Li Chengbin) suddenly drops out of a planned trip with her down to Hainan island over the National Holiday, Li Xiaomei decides to visit her parents instead. Ji Peizhen has just finished her last day as a junior high school geography teacher and finally, after putting it off for a long time, goes to hospital to have a checkup for some lower stomach pains she’s been having. After an initial examination, the doctor (Bai Xueyun) wants to do a CT scan immediately but Ji Peizhen puts it off when Li Xiaomei calls to say she’s coming down by train. At home, Li Xiaomei is welcomed by her surgeon father Li Wenfang (Xu Yajun) and his aged mother (Wu Yanshu) who has Alzheimer’s. The next day, on 1 Oct, Li Xiaomei is forced to attend her mother’s retirement lunch at the school, where Ji Peizhen tries to pair her off with the sons of her colleagues. Li Wenfang is summoned by an emergency to the hospital where he works, and mid-meal a moneylender (Guo Jingbo) and his men arrive demanding that Ji Peizhen pays the debts of her no-good younger brother, gambler and ex-con Ji Peiqi (Chen Minghao). She calmly tells them it’s none of her business. At the hospital Li Wenfang is told Ji Peizhen has a uterine tumour, and next day a CT scan confirms it is malignant and spreading. Meanwhile, after an argument with her mother, Li Xiaomei has stormed back to Beijing. A few days later Ji Peizhen and her husband drive to Beijing to see a surgeon friend, Ren Tong (Cheng Yong), and get the best surgery possible. They stay at Li Xiaomei’s flat and say they’ve come for her father’s school reunion. Ren Tong tells Li Wenfang it’s too late to save Ji Peizhen but Li Wenfang asks him to do the best possible. Ji Peizhen starts nosing around in Li Xiaomei’s private life and mother and daughter have another argument, during which Ji Peizhen collapses. She wakes up in hospital and during the operation Ren Tong finds the cancer is at stage four (terminal) and has spread throughout the pelvis; she has foru to six months to live. Ji Peizhen asks for the same treatment as the terminal patient in the next bed, restauratrice Liu Mei (Zhang Xinyi), whose life has been prolonged for over a year and whose carefree attitude to death has inspired her. Gradually Ji Peizhen tries to mend her fences with her daughter.

REVIEW

The bumpy career of Jilin-born film-maker Zhao Tianyu 赵天宇 – which has so far revealed one very enjoyable rom-com (Love O2O 微微一笑很倾城, 2016) and three rather more uneven features (Deadly Delicious 双食记, 2008; The Law of Attraction 万有引力, 2011; Zhongkui: Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal 钟馗伏魔 雪妖魔灵, 2015) – continues with his fifth feature All about My Mother 关于我妈的一切, a vehicle for veteran Mainland actress Xu Fan 徐帆 that ends up as a predictable cancer tear-jerker crossed with a daughter-mother melodrama. Originally intended to premiere in competition at the Beijing film festival in Aug 2021, it ended up going first into cinemas when the event was delayed by a month due to coronavirus restrictions. Box office was a polite RMB150 million, just over half the take for Love O2O.

Wuhan-born Xu, 54, has racked up a relatively small but notable collection of performances during the past three decades, mostly in films directed by her husband Feng Xiaogang 冯小刚 (such as Be There or Be Square 不见不散, 1998; Sigh 一声叹息, 2000; Cell Phone 手机, 2003; Aftershock 唐山大地震, 2010; Only Cloud Knows 只有芸知道, 2019). However, she’s an actress who’s often at the mercy of the material she’s given, and in Mother she’s lumbered with the character of a terminally annoying busybody for whom the viewer is later asked to feel pity. The script, by Li Jie 李洁 (one of the six writers on Zhongkui), Zhao and husband-and-wife team Tian Xiaowei 田晓威 and Zhu Zhu 朱珠 (Love Contractually 合约男女, 2017), unfolds largely from the point-of-view of the daughter, played by Zhang Jingyi 张婧仪, 22, with the same quiet determination she showed in her feature debut, Love Will Tear Us Apart 我要我们在一起, 2021). During the film’s first half, the way in which she stands up to her mother’s domination acts as a safety valve for the audience’s own frustrations; but in the second half, once the two start to mend their fences as the mother’s terminal cancer takes effect, the film loses any grit it once had and gradually settles into a predictable tear-jerker.

Giving the latter half some occasional spine is a good performance by Sichuan-born Zhang Xinyi 张歆艺 (Miss Puff 泡芙小姐, 2018, but better known from TVD), as a middle-aged hospital roommate whose attitude to her own inevitable death is breezy and inspiring. China’s favourite granny actress, Wu Yanshu 吴彦姝, shows up as a granny with Alzheimer’s, though her role is basically decorative. None of the male roles make much impression, including Xu Yajun 许亚军 as the father and Chen Minghao 陈明昊 as the mother’s no-good, gambling brother.

The family is hardly inspiring: the daughter is a hopeless loser who’s struggling with a job in TV as a lowly production assistant and is eventually dumped by her married lover; the father, a hospital surgeon, is terminally weak; and the mother is a control-freak who hides her insecurities (and illness) by being oppressively dominant and nosy. Her answer to all her daughter’s complaints about a lack of privacy is always: “But I’m your mother!” – a defence that may play more reasonably to Chinese viewers than western ones. Despite that, the dialogue too often has a manufactured feel, and one scene in particular, where the mother defends her daughter in a TV studio, comes across as very phoney.

Like all of Zhao’s films, Mother is technically smooth, with a conventional but pleasant score by composer/sound recordist An Wei 安巍, okay editing by Hong Kong’s Kuang Zhiliang 邝志良 and ditto photography by Hong Kong’s Chen Zhiying 陈志英.

CREDITS

Presented by China Film (CN), Shanghai Firework Entertainment (CN), Beijing Alibaba Pictures (CN), Beijing Tianyu & Miracles Film (CN). Produced by Shanghai Firework Entertainment (CN).

Script: Li Jie, Zhao Tianyu, Zhu Zhu, Tian Xiaowei. Photography: Chen Zhiying. Editing: Kuang Zhiliang, Huang Qiongyi. Music: An Wei. Art direction advice: Zheng Chen. Associate art direction: Wang Qian. Styling: Liu Qian. Sound: An Wei. Visual effects: Xu Yao. Executive direction: Wang Hongquan.

Cast: Xu Fan (Ji Peizhen), Zhang Jingyi (Li Xiaomei), Xu Yajun (Li Wenfang), Wu Yanshu (Li Wenfang’s mother), Li Chengbin (Zheng Yi), Han Yunyun (Yu Lihong), Zhang Xinyi (Liu Mei), Chen Minghao (Ji Peiqi, Ji Peizhen’s younger brother), Zhao Xiaosu (TV director), Chen Yiming (Yiran, celebrity), Wang Xinman (Yiran’s manager), Cheng Yong (Ren Tong, hospital surgeon), Bai Xueyun (Wang Han), Liu Bin (official), Wang Xinting (front-desk receptionist), Liang Baoling (young Ji Peizhen), Guo Jingbo (Dongzi, moneylender), Zhao Yanmin (Zhang Lei), Wei Lu (Zheng Yi’s wife), Xia Tian (Zheng Yi’s young daughter), Chen Jing (TV host).

Release: China, 19 Sep 2021.