The Curious Tale of Mr. Guo

不老奇事

China, 2021, colour, 1.85/2.35:1, 134 mins.

Director: Xu Chao 徐超.

Rating: 4/10.

Long-limbed love story, set across 50 years and two continents, is solid for much of the time but then goes spectacularly off the rails.

STORY

Qingdao, northern China, 1968, winter. Guo Xiaolu (Zhu Gengyou), the eight-year-old son of a research chemist (Zhang Pingyu), sees the arrival of chemistry professor Su Minghua (Kong Lingxi), with his his wife (Ma Zihan) and daughter Su Lingfang (Zhao Yutong), who plays the violin. Su Minghua has returned from the US to work with Guo Xiaolu’s father, who unfortunately blows himself up in his laboratory that day. Guo Xiaolu narrowly escapes death but sinks into a coma; the following autumn he wakes up in hospital, where Su Lingfang has been helping to look after him. He’s recovered but, as a result of the explosion, he sees everything in slow motion and therefore has faster responses. Su Lingfang’s parents have both been moved away on work, so she moves in with Guo Xiaolu and his mother. The two children become close, but then an aunt (Xue Yuanyuan) arrives to take Su Lingfang to her village. Su Lingfang and Guo Xiaolu run away to find her parents, whom she’s heard are at a testing site in the Greater Khingan Mountains in northeast China; but they stow away on the wrong train and end up in Qinghai province, in western China, instead. Returned home, Su Lingfang is forced to go with her aunt; but she leaves behind her violin, which Guo Xiaolu starts to learn. However, he receives no letters from Su Lingfang, despite her promise. In autumn 1982, Guo Xiaolu (Wang Chuanjun) manages to get into Beijing Medical College, which Su Lingfang had always dreamed of entering. Before leaving for Beijing he tries, unsuccessfully, to see her in the village; on the train to Beijing he reads all of Su Lingfang’s letters that his mother had initially confiscated but has now given him. (Always bullied by her aunt, she had finally been kicked out by her after six years.) At medical college Guo Xiaolu discovers a different world, alive and vital. He gets to know Wang Xiaomo (Wang Xiaokun), a crafty mortuary attendant, who introduces him to Beijing’s sub-culture of rock music. One night, at a gig, he meets Su Lingfang (Wang Luodan), who’s scarcely recognisable as the girl he once knew and is working as a singer, under the name Lili. She gradually drops her fast-girl act as they renew their friendship but the following summer, just before they’d planned to re-visit Qingdao, she vanishes – with a man who’d promised to help her record an album. Guo Xiaolu gets to know a professor of surgery, Ding Xuenong (Shu Yaoxuan), who spots his talent and takes him under his wing. Ding Xuenong is actually the step-father of Wang Xiaomo, who’s been a perpetual disappointment to him because of his unruliness and love of rock music. Wang Xiaomo takes Guo Xiaolu to a rock club where Su Lingfang, visiting briefly from Shenzhen, is singing; he also bumps into his childhood friend Wang Qingwei (Xu Weihao), who’d originally dreamed of joining the navy but is now studying to be a director at Beijing Film Academy. Wang Qingwei persuades Su Lingfang to stay in Beijing and, with his help, become an actress. Guo Xiaolu follows her around as she builds her career, and meanwhile, with Ding Xuenong’s encouragement, himself becomes a young celebrity surgeon. After his mother dies, and as Su Lingfang more and more spins out of control as her career as an actress flourishes, Guo Xiaolu decides to accept Ding Xuenong’s offer to take his place on a long-term stem-cell research programme in Prague. In autumn 1990, at the age of 30, Guo Xiaolu lands in Prague. He’s met at the airport by Ding Xuenong’s tomboy daughter, Ding Mengmeng (Li Tingting), on whom he’d performed an appendix operation when she was a teenager and he was a trainee surgeon. Ding Mengmeng is now working in the same laboratory as Connie Carter (Ines Laimins), the scientist with whom Guo Xiaolu is to work and who was once a lover of Ding Xuenong. Guo Xiaolu shares a flat in Prague with Ding Mengmeng and over the coming years their lives become intertwined with those of Su Lingfang and Wang Qingwei.

REVIEW

In his first screenplay since the commercial melodrama Somewhere Only We Know 有一个地方只有我们知道 (2015), celebrity Mainland writer and onetime literary bad boy Wang Shuo 王朔 returns with The Curious Tale of Mr. Guo 不老奇事, a sprawling, plot-heavy and very novelistic drama set across 50 years (1968-2018) and two continents, and centred on a boy’s lifelong fascination with a girl he knew from childhood. Solidly acted and largely literal for most of the time, it goes spectacularly off the rails in a final half-hour that invalidates all its earlier attempts to be something more than just a standard long-limbed romance. Box office on the two-hour-plus movie, shot in 2019 by Mainland commercial journeyman Xu Chao 徐超, was an utterly meh RMB36 million.

In the cinema, Wang, 63, is best known for his associations with director Feng Xiaogang 冯小刚 (Party A, Party B 甲方乙方, 1997; Sigh 一声叹息, 2000; If You Are the One II 非诚勿扰II, 2010), Jiang Wen 姜文 (In the Heat of the Sun 阳光灿烂的日子, 1994; Gone with the Bullets 一步之遥, 2014) and Zhang Yuan 张元 (I Love You 我爱你, 2002; Little Red Flowers 看上去很美, 2006), with his best and most challenging work around the 1990s. Even compared with his last collaboration with Feng, the mixed-bag satire Personal Tailor 私人订制 (2013), Mr. Guo seems light-years away, much closer to the conventional Somewhere – also, coincidentally set in Prague – with its episodic construction and lack of emotional traction.

The fault lies with Wang’s screenplay (co-written with Wu Ti 吴荑, one of eight writers on sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth 流浪地球, 2019) rather than the direction by Xu, a writer-turned-director who graduated from Beijing Film Academy in 2006 and has since worked solidly as a commercial journeyman (Aroma City 芳香之城传奇, 2011, with Zhu Yin 朱茵 [Athena Chu]; Not As Reticent Cicada 不愿沉默的知了, 2017). Xu’s direction is never less than solid, supported by a conventional but pleasantly romantic score by Liu Tao 刘韬 (Forever Young 无问西东, 2018), and good-looking, evocative photography of Mainland and Czech locations by UK-born Paul Morris, whose background is in documentaries and advertising but who was 2nd unit d.p. on Jiang Wen’s Hidden Man 邪不压正 (2018), in which he also had a small role as a doctor.

Xu – not to be confused with the identically named writer-director of quirky serial-killer mystery Vengeance Is Mine 六连煞 (2019) – provides a reliable technical package for Wang’s script, with a few flourishes (like suddenly expanding the screen ratio from 1.85 to 2.35 as the narrative switches from 1990 Beijing to Prague) that are show-offy but liven up the movie. It’s when Wang’s script – which has been flirting with lofty concepts like memory, immortality, and the way some people change over the years but others don’t – starts jumping the tracks around the 90-minute mark that Xu just goes along with things rather than tries to impose any sense on the ridiculous, ever-escalating story.

Most performances are okay without being throat-grabbing, with variable actress Wang Luodan 王珞丹 (Detective Gui 宅女侦探桂香, 2015; My War 我的战争, 2016) here in her most challenging role to date but never really making her mercurial character ring true, and the permanently blank expression of lead actor Wang Chuanjun 王传君 (who was very good as the leukaemia patient in Dying to Survive 我不是药神, 2018) not helping to make his character’s lifelong obsession with her believable, especially in the face of all her antics. Supporting characters are better etched, especially by Shu Yaoxuan 舒耀瑄 as the old professor who helps the lead’s career and singer-director Wang Xiaokun 王啸坤 (What a Day! 有完没完, 2017) as his unruly, rock music-loving stepson. But it’s 26-year-old, Wuhan-born Li Tingting 李婷婷, in her first major big-screen role, who (not so quietly) steals the film as the professor’s tomboy daughter who’s at the lead’s side throughout his Prague years.

CREDITS

Presented by Beijing Times Films (CN), Beijing Blue Focus (CN), Lakala Pictures (CN), Shenzhen Jintian (CN), Hangzhou Humeng (CN).

Script: Wang Shuo, Wu Ti. Photography: Paul Morris. Editing: Zhou Hao. Music: Liu Tao. Art direction: Liu Jing. Styling: Liu Ning. Sound: Xiong Yi. Action: Gao Fei, Liu Songfeng. Visual effects: Guan Xiaowei. Executive direction: Tao Yi.

Cast: Wang Chuanjun (Guo Xiaolu), Wang Luodan (Su Lingfang), Li Tingting (Ding Mengmeng), Wang Xiaokun (Wang Xiaomo/Wang Lao), Xu Weihao (Wang Qingwei), Shu Yaoxuan (Ding Xuenong), Wu Yanshu (old Su Lingfang), Li Meisi [Ines Laimins] (Connie Carter), Zhu Gengyou (young Guo Xiaolu), Zhao Yutong (young Su Lingfang), An Chenghe (young Wang Qingwei), Tan Jianchang (Wang Wanyou), Sun Huaying (Guo Xiaolu’s mother), Zhang Xinyuan (Lanfang, Ding Xuenong’s second wife), Xue Yuanyuan (Liu Gu, Su Lingfang’s aunt), Kong Lingxi (Su Minghua, Su Lingfang’s father), Ma Zihan (Su Lingfang’s mother), Zhang Pingyu (Guo Xiaolu’s father), Pei Jiaxin (Guo Xiaolu’s mother), Cui Baoyin (Liu, gangster in club).

Release: China, 5 Nov 2021.