Moonlight Warrior

月光武士

China, 2023, colour, 16:9, 109 mins.

Director: Hong Ying 虹影.

Rating: 5/10.

Decent but conventional light drama between a young teenage boy and an older woman, largely set in Chongqing during the mid-1970s.

STORY

Chongqing municipality, central China, 1976. In a hillside village 14-year-old schoolboy Dou Xiaoming (Zuo Hang) defends a mentally retarded young girl, Hei Gu, against some bullies. Given some stitches for some wounds on his forehead, he’s cared for at the local hospital by a beuatiful nurse Qin Jiahui (Feng Jiamei), whom he immediately falls for. When he leaves the hospital he steals her picture from the staff noticeboard. Qin Jiahui is half-Japanese on her mother’s side. Her parents divorced long ago after her mother Chieko (Zhang Xinyu) was sent back after WW2 to Japan, where Qin Jiahui’s father, Qin Yuan (Sun Qing), had met her while studying in the country prior to WW2. Qin Jiahui’s husband, Yang Gangbang (Bai En), is a local gangster who abuses her. After seeing Yang Gangbang make up to another woman, Fangfang (Yang Tiantian), and publically humiliate Qin Jiahui, Dou Xiaoming arranges for him to trip on a path after drinking with his pals and Fangfang that night. He tells Qin Jiahui that he’ll be her “moonlight warrior”, after a Japanese mythical figure in a red costume and on a red horse who battles injustice. The two meet for chats: she says she wants to leave the village and Yang Gangbang wants a divorce, but adds that once he was very kind to her. Her father, who didn’t want to divorce Chieko, was once a university professor but now mends shoes in the village. When Yang Gangbang learns Dou Xiaoming was responsible for his accident, he orders his men to trash the small noodle shop of Dou Xiaoming’s mother, Cui Suzhen (Liu Lei). Dou Xiaoming later confronts him but their argument is interrupted by rival gang leader Long (Wang Junhe) and his men who are in dispute with Yang Gangbang over some stolen coal. Later, Dou Xiaoming hears Qin Jiahui has taken poison; he visits her in hospital at the same time as Yang Gangbang, a fight breaks out, and Yang Gangbang is arrested. After that, Dou Xiaoming’s relationship with his widowed mother improves. That autumn, Yang Gangbang is released from prison and tries to make up with Qin Jiahui. She tells Dou Xiaoming that Chieko has written to Qin Yuan and they’ll be visiting Japan, along with Yang Gangbang. But then Qin Yuan suddenly dies. After the funeral, Qin Jiahui still decides to visit Japan, along with Yang Gangbang, who is still having an affaire with Fangfang but has heard that Chieko is wealthy. After Qin Jiahui leaves, Dou Xiaoming writes to her but all his letters are returned. Ten years later, Dou Xiaoming (Cai Heng) has graduated from university, is now a pharmacist, and also runs five restaurants. His proud mother is trying to find him a wife, and among the applicants is Su Yan (Peng Jing), a schoolmate from a year lower who’d always liked him. By 1996 Dou Xiaoming is married to Su Yan: they have two children and live in a modern flat, but their marriage is under strain as Dou Xiaoming can’t let the past go. Then one day he bumps into Qin Jiahui at the local cemetery.

REVIEW

A 14-year-old boy carries a torch for a beautiful (and married) nurse many years his senior in Moonlight Warrior 月光武士, a light drama mostly set near Chongqing in 1976. Despite taking place in the turbulent year that marked Mao Zedong’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, the film pretty much ignores politics (apart from a few vague references) and concentrates on the coming of age of a teenager and his obsession with an older woman. It’s a decent but conventional directing debut by writer Hong Ying 虹影 (adapting her own 2021 novel, see left) that has few surprises and is let down by a weaker second half which follows the protagonist into his mid-30s. Released at the end of last year, it took a tiny RMB2 million, standard for much artier fare than this.

Hong Ying, 61, was born in Chongqing, studied in Beijing and Shanghai, and started writing poetry in 1981. In 1988 she switched to novel-writing and three years later moved to the UK, where she married Guilin-born poet Zhao Yiheng 赵毅衡. In 2000 she moved to Beijing, divorcing Zhao in 2003. Aside from her novels, of which one of the best known is the autobiographical The Hungry Daughter 饥饿的女儿 (1997), most of her film & TV work has centred on adaptations of her 2003 novel Lord of Shanghai 上海王, which has formed the basis of a 2008 TVD and two feature films by Hu Xuehua 胡雪桦 [Sherwood Hu] (2016 and 2020). Also, her 2013 novel Death in Shanghai 上海之死 was used partly as the basis for the script of wartime drama Saturday Fiction 兰心大剧院 (2019, dir. Lou Ye 娄烨).

Reminiscent of village romances of the 1990s, but nowadays more fitted to a TV movie, Warrior makes the most of a modest budget and genuine Chongqing locations to draw a simpler era now gone forever, as a young teenager grows up in a gossip-riddled street where everyone knows each other and scrapes a living in mid-1970s China. The country’s economic turmoil and legacy of the Cultural Revolution are succinctly hinted at by the villagers’ simple lifestyle, a criminal gang culture in which the nurse’s husband tries to make money, and the fact that the nurse’s father was once a university professor who now mends shoes. Other than that, the story is entirely devoted to the relationship between the boy and the nurse, an obviously impossible one that she handles gently and he is prepared to wait upon.

When she leaves, at the hour mark, to visit her long-lost Japanese mother, the story bounces forward first 10 years and then 20 – a commonly used device in films of this type to show China’s rapid development. Now married with kids, and in his mid-30s, he’s financially successful but still can’t let the past go. This second half has a much more manufactured feel and lacks the simplicity that made the equally conventional first half acceptable. There’s also the slight problem that the male lead is now played by a new actor of the right age (dancer-turned-actor Cai Heng 蔡珩, 35, handsome but wooden) but the female lead (who must now be in her late 40s) by the same actress, who doesn’t seem to have aged a day. Chongqing-born pop singer-turned-actress Feng Jiamei 冯家妹, who’s actually in her mid-30s, made a glamorous debut in Cherry Goddess 9号女神 (2014) but has mostly been in supporting roles since then – which is a pity as she’s good, especially in the first half, as the abused wife who kindly tolerates her young admirer. Young boybander Zuo Hang 左航, 15 at the time of shooting in late 2021, and stripped of his stage make-up, is also effective and has convincing chemistry with Feng.

The rest of the cast are all solid and the whole thing is professionally mounted, from the straightforward photography by Taiwan’s Qin Hai 秦海 to the warmly delicate score by Johan Stjernholm, a London and Beijing-based composer-cum-choreographer-cum-artistic director. It’s just not especially involving on an emotional level nor dramatically arresting on a narrative one, though the ending has a mature feel. Most of the dialogue is in Chongqing dialect.

CREDITS

Presented by Huanle (Chongqing) Pictures (CN), ShanghaiHongpo Cultural Media (CN). Produced by Beijing Jiayang Hengfeng Information Consulting (CN), iQiyi Pictures (Beijing) (CN).

Script: Hong Ying. Novel: Hong Ying. Photography: Qin Hai. Editing: Xiao Ruguan, Mo Huijia. Music: Johan Stjernholm. Art direction: Zhou Weigong. Sound: Mo Huijia, Zhang Jinyan. Cost design: Hong Ying, Liu Yunqiu, Xi Pei. Executive direction: Yin Dandan.

Cast: Zuo Hang (young Dou Xiaoming), Feng Jiamei (Qin Jiahui), Cai Heng (Dou Xiaoming), Bai En (Yang Gangbang), Liu Lei (Cui Suzhen, Dou Xiaoming’s mother), Peng Jing (Su Yan), Lv Xingchen (Wang Ying, nurse), Wang Junhe (Long, rival gang leader), Kan Xin (adult Hei Gu, mad girl), Yi Shuo (Wu, group leader), Sun Qing (Qin Yuan, Qin Jiahui’s father), Xie Yuwang (Cheng San), Weng Chuhan (Cheng Si), Yang Tiantian (Fangfang), Zhang Xinyu (Chieko, Qin Jiahui’s mother), Yang Deyu (Qiu, grandmother), Wu Qi (Yuan), Wang Jiu (Bin), Xiao Xi (Ningning), Wang Congmei (Hehe), Hu Yuntian (young Su Yan).

Release: China, 15 Dec 2023.