I Dreamed a Dream
梦境人生
China, 2021, colour, 2.35:1, 105 mins.
Director: Duan Qihua 段祺华.
Associate directors: Shen Yue 沈悦, Jiang Xiaoxiao 蒋笑笑.
Rating: 4/10.
Ambitious drama set in the past, present and dreamland looks good but has a chaotically developed script.
STORY
Shanghai, 2013. Li Shihao (Zhao Wenxuan), chairman of hotel-management company Shihao Corporation, decides to transfer all his shares to Zhu Liying (Wang Lin), his first love from high-school days whom he hasn’t seen since they were both sent down to the countryside in the early 1970s during the Cultural Revolution. At the board meeting Li Shuijing (Wang Jiajia), his daughter by his late wife, protests and is ordered by him to leave. Soon afterwards Li Shihao falls into a coma. Li Shuijing goes to the Dream Yoga Centre – part of the company’s mysterious Dream subsidiary that also deals in products that stimulate dreams – to communicate with her father via the Eye of the Candle Dragon 烛龙之眼, a tunnel connecting reality with dreams that the two have always shared. They meet in dreamland, where he reveals to her his memories of the early 1970s. (As a teenager [Zhang Kaitai] at high school, he had met and dated classmate Zhu Liying [Li Junjie]. His best friend had been Lu Jiandong [Han Yuchen] and hers had been tubby Wan Xiaohong [Yi Yangyang].) Li Shihao’s memories are interspersed by Li Shuijing’s more recent memories of her fraught marriage to Han Xianquan (Liu Kaiwei), based in London. (The high-school class had been sent down to the countryside to work on the land; their company commander was Fu Lianjun [Cai Pengfei], a friend of Zhu Liying’s elder brother who had fancied Zhu Liying and had already beaten up Li Shihao when he had taken her on a date to the cinema.) Wan Xiaohong (Zhang Zhihua) has arranged a big classmates reunion, to which Zhu Liying and Li Shuijing – who have made contact – go together. Because of the share transfer, Zhu Liying already owns the hotel it’s held in, so she ends up paying for it. (After Zhu Liying had collapsed one day due to the manual labour, Li Shihao had stood up for her and had been punished by Fu Lianjun, who took the opportunity to keep them apart by having Zhu Liying transferred to a pharmacy job. Zhu Liying had made a secret deal with Fu Lianjun, on condition that he went easy on Li Shihao’s punishment. When Li Shihao had heard about her transfer from his old high-school teacher Xu [Yuan Hua] – who had also been sent down to the countryside – he had become angry. Xu had taught him “dream yoga” to calm him down. It appeared that Zhu Liying had collapsed because she was pregnant. As she was only 19, Fu Lianjun had offered to quietly arrange an abortion, and to marry her when she turned 20.) For years Zhu Liying has had a troubled marriage to Shi Zhichun (Zhao Longhao), a philandering film producer who’s now being chased by creditors. She also has a layabout teenage son, Shi Ming (Zhou Yixuan), who shows her no respect. While trying to raise some money, Shi Zhichun hears about the valuable Dream subsidiary, which his wife now owns; he tries to pressurise her to sell some of her shares. Meanwhile, during a meeting with her father in dreamland, Li Shuijing tries to introduce him to Zhu Liying, but he doesn’t remember her as it’s been some 40 years. And then Li Shuijing comes across some startling news about her own parentage.
REVIEW
Most of the ambition behind I Dreamed a Dream 梦境人生 – which attempts a drama that takes place mostly in “dreamland” – is lost in its chaotically developed script, which has far too many characters for its own good and too many confusing narratives. Though it’s always good-looking, with classy widescreen photography by Japan’s Toyoda Jitsu 丰田实 (The Old Capital 古都, 2016), and has some individually impressive scenes, it doesn’t begin to hang together as a whole, further saddled with a heavy-handed ending in which all the fantasy elements are explained rationally and the many loose ends are tied up. Shot in 2018, and passed for release in late 2019, this first directing effort by scriptwriter Duan Qihua 段祺华 finally hit Mainland screens in autumn 2021, taking a weedy RMB7.3 million.
Set in Shanghai in 2013, the film starts by describing the Eye of the Candle Dragon 烛龙之眼, a tunnel connecting reality with dreamland that Li Shuijing has always shared with her businessman father, Li Shihao. The two have a boardroom falling-out when she objects to him transferring all his shares to Zhu Liying, a first love he hasn’t seen for 40 years. Soon afterwards, he ends up in a coma, and the daughter uses the transcendental tunnel to communicate with him and learn about his love affaire as a young man during the Cultural Revolution. As the film moves back and forth in time, it partly becomes another showpiece for how far the country has come during the past half-century, though its true centre is the differences between dreams, memories and real life. However, the love story between Li Shihao and Zhu Liying, set during high school and being “sent down” to do manual work in the countryside, soon dominates, especially when there are differences of opinion in what really happened back then. The bitty present-day story loses emotional traction, though in the film’s latter stages Li Shuijing finds that the past still impacts on the present.
Toyoda’s classy widescreen photography has separate visual palettes for present-day Shanghai, the 1970s countryside, and the world of dreamland, and scoring by France’s Laurent Couson (who’s worked regularly with film-maker Claude Lelouch) is always delicate. But the film’s construction is all over the place, with no internal rhythm, characters coming and going, and there are too many tired cliches like wine-drinking symbolising money and refinement. Then in his late 50s, Taiwan veteran Zhao Wenxuan 赵文瑄 [Winston Chao] plays the present-day father with a kind of rote authority, while Mainland actress Wang Jiajia 王佳佳 (the “other woman” in indie drama Wisdom Tooth 日光之下, 2019) is as solid as ever as his daughter and Shanghai-born TV actress Wang Lin 王琳 (Tiny Times 4 小时代 灵魂尽头, 2015) is okay as the older Zhu Liying. Zhang Kaitai 张开泰 and Li Junjie 李君婕 are lively as the younger versions of the father and Zhu Liying; Hong Kong veteran action player Yuan Hua 元华 pops up as a crusty old “sent-down” teacher who educates our hero in “dream yoga”; and Hong Kong pin-up Liu Kaiwei 刘恺威 has a nothing role as the daughter’s husband who’s abroad in the UK. The whole subplot of dream yoga, the Eye of the Candle Dragon, and the drugs behind the dreamland communication is all very fuzzy indeed.
The film appears to have had a problematic journey to the screen. Announced in Dec 2017, it started shooting in Shanghai in late Mar 2018 under the title 梦瑜伽 (literally, “Dream Yoga”) and with a plot that was quite different (Li Shihao was a brain scientist returning from the UK to do research, not chairman of a hotel-management group, and Shuijing was his assistant, not daughter). Duan was credited as the writer but not specifically as the director. On the final print, two “associate directors” are credited – veteran film/TV journeyman Shen Yue 沈悦 (also creative producer 监制) and younger Shanghai film-maker Jiang Xiaoxiao 蒋笑笑 – as well as “associate scriptwriters” Zhou Qi 周祺 and Zhang Xiaoqin 张小亲. All of this suggests extensive rewrites and reshoots, as well as the need to have experienced Hong Kong-based editor David Richardson to try to piece it all together. The film’s Chinese title literally means “Dreamland (Human) Life”.
CREDITS
Presented by Dream Universe (Shanghai) Media (CN), Shanghai Place Maker Media (CN). Produced by Dream Universe (Shanghai) Media (CN).
Script: Duan Qihua, Zhou Qi, Zhang Xiaoqin. Photography: Toyoda Jitsu. Editing: David Richardson. Music: Laurent Couson. Music supervision: Thomas Faucheur. Art direction: Li Anran. Styling: Huang Wei. Sound: Zhu Jingchun. Action: Zhi Huijie, Gao Jialong. Visual effects: Liu Zhiping (Mo Ying Quantum Culture). Executiver direction: Fang Yuxiang.
Cast: Zhao Wenxuan [Winston Chao] (Li Shihao), Wang Lin (Zhu Liying), Wang Jiajia (Li Shuijing/Crystal), Yuan Hua (Xu, high-school teacher), Zhang Kaitai (young Li Shihao), Li Junjie (young Zhu Liying), Liu Kaiwei (Han Xianquan, Li Shuijing’s husband), Zhang Zhihua (Wan Xiaohong, Zhu Liying’s friend), Zhao Longhao (Shi Zhichun, Zhu Liying’s husband), Qian Zhi (Lu Jiandong, lawyer), Zhou Yemang (Fu Lianjun), Wang Qiang (Hou Tianshu, Dream Yoga Centre manager), Cai Pengfei (young Fu Lianjun, company commander), Han Yuchen (young Lu Jiandong, Li Shihao’s school friend), Yang Kaidi (Lu Na, police captain, Lu Jiandong’s daughter), Xu Haiwei (Zhang Xing), Zhou Yixuan (Shi Ming, Zhu Liying’s son), Yi Yangyang (young Wan Xiaohong, Zhu Liying’s school friend), Bai Yue (young Wang Lipin), Li Yan (Wang Jianguo), Tahara Saori (Xiaosi, Shi Zhichun’s mistress), Hou Yuhan (yoga coach), Hu Qingyun (Wang Lipin), Yuan Quan (Zhu Kunlin), Xue Bin (Tong Zhigang), Liu Zhonghu (Li, government department head), Wang Jiaru (Gao Xiaoshan), Xiao Songyuan (Zheng Changjie), Xing Wenjie (Guo Datian), Chen Jirong (Ma Xiaofeng).
Release: China, 10 Sep 2021.