Give Me Five
哥，你好
China, 2022, colour, 2.35:1, 110 mins.
Director: Zhang Luan 张栾.
Rating: 5/10.
Time-travel comedy – largely set back in the 1980s – has a strong cast and first half, but runs out of wit and puff.
STORY
A city in China, 2021. Xiaowu (Chang Yuan), 30, lost his mother soon after his birth and has been raised by his father, Wu Hongqi (Wei Xiang), 60, who never remarried. The two have always had a distant relationship, as if Wu Hongqi never really liked his son; and now the ageing Wu Hongqi has moments when he loses his short-term memory and thinks Xiaowu is in fact his elder brother. Xiaowu has a longtime girlfriend, Zhang Xiaohua (Zhang Jiawen), who is impatient over his refusal to commit. Meanwhile, Wu Hongqi goes on a blind date in the park one day and almost drowns when he falls into the lake. With his father in a coma in hospital, Xiaowu has to find some money to pay for the medical expenses. He eventually finds his father’s savings book, which has RMB500,000. In the same biscuit tin is a ring and a notebook, which turns out to be his late mother’s diary “dedicated to Wu Hongqi”. Xiaowu puts on the ring and starts to read the diary, which begins when the couple first got to know each other, on 30 May 1986. Suddenly Xiaowu is sucked back in time to that day, landing in the bathhouse of No. 1 Factory in Nanhezi district, Shuangqing city, as his mother, Lu Chunli (Ma Li), aged 27, and three female co-workers arrive after work. They gossip about a university graduate, Wu Hongqi, who’s just arrived at the factory as an engineer, and joke that Lu Chunli, who’s a senior workshop technician and romantically unattached, actually fancies him. Hiding in the bathhouse, Xiaowu witnesses all this, until the alarm is raised when a peeper (Hao Pengfei) is spotted on the roof. The women chase him through the night streets, where Wu Hongqi (Wei Xiang) happens to be passing with his bicycle. As a result, he gets to know one of the women, Qin Shiyu (Huang Yuntong), with whom he shares a love of the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore. Xiaowu observes all this but is then suddenly bounced back to the present. He realises that Wu Hongqi should have met Lu Chunli that night, not Qin Shiyu, in order for him to be born. He tries to travel back to a later date, 14 Jun 1988, and eventually manages after finding in the diary a ticket for Xiyan Dance Hall, a local karaoke joint that the factory has booked for the evening. He lands in the gents toilet, which Li Chunli has mistakenly entered to refresh her lipstick. They get to know each other and Li Chunli announces that Xiaowu is her boyfriend. The evening is overshadowed by the boastful Luo A Qiang (Jia Bing), a laid-off worker who’s come back after getting rich in the south, trying to persuade Lu Chunli to endorse his plan to buy the run-down state-owned Factory No. 1. She refuses and Luo eventually leaves. But Xiaowu notices that, after two years, Wu Hongqi is still dating Qin Shiyu rather than his future mother; as it’s already 1988, only three years before his birth on 11 Jul 1991, time is running out for Xiaowu to get Wu Hongqi together with Lu Chunli.
REVIEW
A young man goes back to the 1980s and meets the mother he never knew in Give Me Five 哥，你好, a time-travel comedy of manners and nostalgia with more than a faint resemblance to the 2021 CNY mega-hit Hi, Mom 你好，李焕英. It’s not in that film’s league, and doesn’t sustain its central idea in the padded-out second half; but at its best this third feature by Beijing-born director Zhang Luan 张栾 (Our Happiness 相声大电影之我要幸福, 2017; Song of Youth 老师！好, 2019) has a strong cast that’s on its game, especially Mainland comedienne Ma Li 马丽 as the slightly wacky mother. It’s proved Zhang’s biggest box office success, taking over RMB530 million in its first nine weeks. [Final tally was a solid RMB549 million.]
The film’s eye-catching poster, mimicking old-style poster art, leads one to believe the film will be a kind of nostalgic comedy in the style of Ma Hua FunAge 开心麻花, especially as the three leads are all regulars of the Beijing troupe. In fact, Give Me Five isn’t that sharp, and the nostalgia lies more in the convincingly natural art direction by Wang Xi 王希 (who worked on Zhang’s Song of Youth, also set in the 1980s) and the supportive look by d.p. Chen Jun 陈军 (B for Busy 爱情神话, 2021) than in any clever tropes in the screenplay by Dong Tianyi 董天翼. Nevertheless, from the theatrical feel of the whole production, which gives plenty of space to the actors, it’s no surprise to discover that Dalian-born Dong’s background is as much in acting and the stage as in writing and the cinema. As well as working in provincial theatre, Dong, notably, was also one of the writers on TV comedy series Love Him If You Dare 人见人爱 (2014), directed by and starring Ma Hua icon Shen Teng 沈腾.
In Hi, Mom a young woman travelled back to 1981 and tried to change the past as she met her mother-to-be; in Give Me Five a young man travels back to the second half of the 1980s and tries to make sure that his father gets together with the mother whom he never knew. Despite the similarities, they’re very different films. Five has none of Mom‘s emotional complexities nor its feel-good, big-hearted appeal; it’s more of a one-note joke, in which 30-year-old Xiaowu (lantern-faced Chang Yuan 常远, Warm Hug 温暖的抱抱, 2020, Another Me 李茂扮太子, 2022) one day discovers his late mother’s diary and keeps bouncing back and forth in time as he monitors his parents’ rather awkward courtship. Nostalgia for the simpler way of life in 1980s China is palpable, though underscored by the economic realities of cash-strapped state enterprises and the growing market economy.
The best stuff is in the first half as, after establishing the distant relationship between Xiaowu and the father (Wei Xiang 魏翔, the “assassin” in Too Cool to Kill 这个杀手不太冷静, 2022) who’s raised him, Xiaowu accidentally travels back in time, arriving first in a factory bathhouse where his future mother arrives with some female colleagues after work, and later at a work party where the factory has taken over a local karaoke joint. The characters and writing are both sharp in this first half. But as Xiaowu gradually gets to know his late mother (and finally learns the truth of her death), the film develops none of the deeper emotional undercurrents of Hi, Mom; it always remains a larky comedy, with a soppy final section, than anything else. Unfortunately this means that the central idea can’t sustain itself, and the second half has a padded-out feel. Despite a brief reinvigoration 20 minutes before the end (with Xiaowu’s birth), the film tapers off into a section centred on parental love that’s unworthy of the lively beginning.
The three leads have made several films together – including recent hit Another Me – and are clearly at ease with each other. Though she looks a tad too old for the part of a 27-year-old, Ma, 38 at the time of shooting, is otherwise terrific as the factory team leader who’s a mixture of silliness and determination. She’s equally good facing off against a 1980s-style entrepreneur (Jia Bing 贾冰) who wants to invest in the factory as well as awkwardly trying to attract the attention of Wei’s shy character at a work party or lipsticking herself up in the gents before sashaying onto the dance floor. Wei, a longtime character actor who can sometimes be too self-effacing, here hits just the right balance as the father, both in flashbacks where he’s dominated by competing women and the present where incipient dementia has him calling his son “big brother” (a joke encoded in the film’s Chinese title). Supports are equally strong, from outrageous character actor Jia (the religious nutter in The Eleventh Chapter 第十一回, 2019; oily boss in Big Red Envelope 大红包, 2021) as the flashy entrepreneur to Chongqing-born newcomer Huang Yuntong 黄允桐 as a female co-worker who accidentally gets first dibs at Xiaowu’s future father.
Both of Zhang’s previous theatrical features suffered delays in being released, and Give Me Five was no exception: it was shot back in Aug-Oct 2020, under the title 小伍哥 (literally, “Big Brother Little Wu”). He also hasn’t been very lucky with English titles: his last film (literally, “Hello, Teacher!”) was given the bland English title Song of Youth, while the current one (literally “Hello, Big Brother”) has been saddled with the ridiculous Give Me Five.
The film My Beloved 妈妈再爱我一次 that’s referenced in the film is a 1988 Taiwan mother-and-son weepie that starred Taiwan actress Yang Guimei 杨贵媚. Directed by Chen Zhuhuang 陈朱煌, it was released in the Mainland in Sep 1990.
CREDITS
Presented by Wanda Pictures (Hainan) (CN), Author’s Journey (Haikou) (CN), Tianjin Maoyan Weiying Cultural Media (CN), Champion Yu (Beijing) Pictures (CN), Wanda Media (CN), Author’s Journey (Beijing) (CN), Banma Pictures (CN).
Script: Dong Tianyi. Script planning: Xu Wei. Photography: Chen Jun. Editing: Chen Zhiwei, Ma Zhiyao. Music supervision: Wang Tianci. Art direction: Wang Xi. Styling: Tan Xiaoshi. Sound: Wu Lei, Wang Shengwei.
Cast: Ma Li (Lu Chunli/Da Liu), Chang Yuan (Xiaowu), Wei Xiang (Wu Hongqi), Jia Bing (Luo A Qiang), Huang Yuntong (Qin Shiyu), Han Yanbo (head doctor), Li Taoyaoyao [Li Zhihui] (Tang Guihua), Hao Pengfei (peeper in bathhouse), Liu Yuqiao (Song Fangling), Zhang Jiawen (Zhang Xiaohua, Xiaowu’s girlfriend), Zhang Yiming (wedding MC), Li Yining (Li, doctor), Lv Ning (Zhao Jinlei, competitor in factory contest), Wang Wei (shop owner).
Release: China, 9 Sep 2022.