Catman
我爱喵星人
China, 2021, colour, 2.35:1, 90 mins.
Director: Liu Xikun 刘希坤 [Bak Heui-gon 박희곤 | 朴熙坤].
Rating: 3/10.
Fluffy youth rom-com aimed at Mainland teenage fans of hallyu is utterly generic, with a wooden Korean lead.
STORY
Somewhere in China, the present day. Well-known feline researcher and lecturer Liang Qu (Oh Se-hun) returns from the US after nine years and publicly criticises a new app that claims to aid communication between cats and their owners. Launched in a beta version, it’s become the target of animal-rights campaigners who claim it harms cats. The app’s inventor, Mao Xiaowan (Wu Qian), has been given a month to improve it by the company’s chairman (Yu Bo) or be sacked. She gets moral support from Jeff (Li Xinliang), a director in the company who appears to fancy her, and a girly-guy friend in the R&D department, Momo (Xu Ke), recommends approaching Liang Qu for help, as he was her boyfriend at senior high school before suddenly disappearing off to the US. She does so, though Liang Qu is non-committal. (At high school, he’d defended her against bullies one day but had been accidentally bitten by a cat and turned into a half-human, half-cat person. He then broke the golden rule of Master Meow [Sun Ning] of never falling in love with a human, and was sentenced to live for nine years as a cat, with a maximum of 12 hours a day as a human. The sentence has one more month to go.) After his talk with Mao Xiaowan, Liang Qu is involved in a car crash; when she arrives at the scene he’s already morphed into a cat, and she takes it home as a pet, not knowing it is Liang Qu. In the morning he escapes back to the flat he’s sharing with fellow catman Chaochao (Song Weilong), with whom he originally fled to the US. Mao Xiaowan visits the flat and persuades Liang Qu to help her. Meanwhile, Jeff and Mao Xiaowan’s department head, Vivian (Xu Jiaqi), plan to steal the app once it’s been fixed.
REVIEW
The inventor of a cat app falls (again) for her high-school love – now a half-man, half-feline – in Catman 我爱喵星人, a pretty piece of nonsense solidly aimed at Mainland teenage girls high on South Korean boybander Oh Se-hun 오세훈 | 吴世勋. This formulaic, fantasy rom-com – actually shot five years ago – isn’t quite as embarrassing as the Hong Kong comedy Meow 喵星人 (2017), which had an almost identical Chinese title and featured a feline alien. But it does come close, and is only rescued by a bouncy performance from young Mainland actress Wu Qian 吴倩, as a self-obsessed millennial who keeps putting her foot in it. Briefly released online in May, it deserves to be quietly forgotten.
The most interesting thing about Catman is its history. The Mainland-funded film was shot entirely in South Korea (Seoul and Busan) from late March to early May 2016, starring Oh, then 22 and a member of Korean-Chinese boy group Exo, and Wu, 23, then a fast-rising star of TV drama series, under the direction of Bak Heui-gon 박희곤 | 朴熙坤, a South Korean commercial journeyman in his late 40s (Insadong Scandal 인사동 스캔들, 2009; Perfect Game 퍼펙트 게임, 2011). Oh’s Exo colleague Bak Chan-yeol 박찬열 | 朴灿烈 had recently made the Mainland rom-com So, I Married My Anti-Fan 所以……和黑粉结婚了 (2016) and Catman was meant to be just another piece of fluff aimed at Mainland fans of K-Pop, with a release scheduled for spring 2017. Anti-Fan was released on 30 Jun 2016, but the following month the Chinese government imposed an unofficial ban on South Korean films, TVDs and popular cultural products following Seoul’s decision in early July to install the US-made THAAD anti-missile defence system against North Korea.
Though its story is set in China, and the film was shot in Chinese, Catman fell under the ban, which still exists today, presumably because it starred Oh. Nevertheless, it was officially certified for Mainland cinema release in mid-2018. Several years later, out of the blue, a release date of 14 Mar 2021 was announced (see poster, left), then delayed till 21 May, and then cancelled. In the meantime, it was released online for a couple of hours on 11 May. Even more mysteriously, all names on the credits have been transliterated into pinyin, giving none of the usual clues as to who, especially among the technicians, are actually Koreans. Director Bak’s name has been changed to the Chinese-sounding Liu Xikun 刘希坤, the “Xikun” mirroring the hanja for his “Heui-gon” 熙坤.
Warmly shot by Korean d.p. Son Weon-ho 손원호 | 孙源镐 (Chinese remake The Witness 我是证人, 2015) and silkily scored by Korean American Go Byeong-uk 고병욱 [Benjamin B. Ko], the film has a pronounced Korean look and feel despite being set in an anonymous city somewhere in Mainland China. Flashbacks to rural high-school days, a decade ago, look particularly Korean, though none of this would have mattered to its target audience of hallyu fans, as song montages jog the movie along and Oh walks through the film with the same immaculate pretty-boy looks. The scarcely choate plot is simply a peg for repeated situations in which the lead morphs back and forth while trying not to fall in love (again) with his onetime high-school sweetheart who’s trying to develop an app to talk to cats – because, if he does, Master Meow will turn him into a cat forever. Some of the early humour is faintly risqué as the heroine plays with him as a cat, and even considers a vet’s recommendation to sterilise it; but even that kind of humour is dropped as the film turns into a generic youth romance, capped by a manufactured finale in which the heroine is kidnapped by some nasties.
Due to the film being put on the shelf, Wu has since stayed fulltime in TVDs. But here, in her first film lead, she traverses the full range from googoo-eyed teenager to full-on vamp in a sexy red dress, and manages to keep her role popping despite the poker-faced, look-at-me stare of Oh, in his first film role. As their generic sidekicks, Mainland actor-model Song Weilong 宋威龙, then 17, bounces around as the lead’s best pal, while Xu Ke 徐可, 25, gushes as the heroine’s girly-guy friend. Girl-grouper/model/actress Ju Jingyi 鞠婧祎 cameos as a well-known, er, model, while fellow SNH48-er Xu Jiaqi 许佳琪 pops in and out as the office bitch. It’s all very Gen-’90, and borderline camp.
The film’s Chinese title roughly means “I Love a Meow Alien”. Veteran Taiwan editor Liao Qingsong 廖庆松 is presumably responsible for the tight 90-minute running time.
CREDITS
Presented by Shanghai Croton Cultural Media (CN), Huace Pictures (Tianjin) (CN). Produced by Shanghai Croton Cultural Media (CN).
Script: Song Weihan, Zhou Yi, Zhang Yamei, Wei Tianyi. Photography: Son Weon-ho. Editing: Choi U-gon, Liao Qingsong. Music direction: Go Byeong-uk [Benjamin B. Ko]. Art direction: Liu Yuning. Costume design: Han Yaqing. Visual effects: Xu Xianghe, Xu Xiangxun (Xnergy). Sound: Go Byeong-uk [Benjamin B. Ko], Wang Shengyi.
Cast: Oh Se-hun (Liang Qu), Wu Qian (Mao Xiaowan), Song Weilong (Chaochao), Li Xinliang (Jeff, company director), Xu Ke (Momo), Xu Jiaqi (Vivian, R&D department head), Sun Ning (Master Meow), Ju Jingyi (Molly, model), Yu Bo (company chairman), Liang Fan (vet), Liu Yuhang, Liu Yibing (male students), Wu Jiayong, Yu Shiyang, Hu Ge (female students).
Release: China, 11 May 2021 (online).