The Breakup Guru
分手大师
China, 2014, colour, 2.35:1, 114 mins.
Directors: Deng Chao 邓超, Yu Baimei 俞白眉.
Rating: 6/10.
Splashy, knockabout farce on love and money is too overstuffed for its own good.
STORY
Mauritius, the present day. Mainland Chinese tourist Xiaozhuang (Gulnazar) is rescued from drowning by a handsome local, La Blaka, whom everyone at the tourist resort hails as the king of the island. When her boyfriend (Han Han) arrives and proposes to her, she turns him down; but subsequently La Blaka disappears. In fact, La Blaka was actually Mei Yuangui (Deng Chao), a self-styled “break-up master” 分手大师 who seduces women so their partners can painlessly get rid of them. Mei Yuangui plans to retire after one more scam job. After holidaying in Qingdao, he takes a coach back to Beijing that is robbed by bandits; on it he meets kooky loner Ye Xiaochun (Yang Mi), whom he follows back to her down-at-heel flat in Dongsi, central Beijing, where he meets her boyfriend, middle-aged Tang Dashan (Liang Chao), a self-improvement guru who runs Master Tang’s Successology Theatre. Ye Xiaochun is suspicious of Mei Yuangui but idolises Tang Dashan, for whom she works as an assistant. Tang Dashan hires Mei Yuangui to work with her, distributing flyers and being a cheerleader at his shows. As Tang Dashan is about to take his company public, and can’t be seen to be dating an employee, he then assigns Mei Yuangui to make Ye Xiaochun break up with him, in the least painful way possible. Mei Yuangui says he’ll make Ye Xiaochun fall in love with him. He assembles his team of scam-artist colleagues – childhood friends Hei (Qin Yue), Lulu (Luan Yuanhui) and Spare Rib (Zhao Manzhu) – and sets to work, first bugging Ye Xiaochun’s flat.
REVIEW
The latest name Mainland actor to turn director – following Xu Zheng 徐峥 with goofy comedy Lost in Thailand 人再囧途之泰囧 (2012) and Zhao Wei 赵薇 with college drama So Young 致我们终将逝去的青春 (2013) – Jiangxi-born Deng Chao 邓超, 35, comes bouncing out of the box with the splashy, knockabout, way-overstuffed farce The Breakup Guru 分手大师. Deng’s film roles so far have tended towards more restrained playing, as the rescued soldier in Assembly 集结号 (2007), the young scholar in Mural 画壁 (2011), and one of the constables in costume whodunit The Four 四大名捕 (2012). It was only in American Dreams in China 中国合伙人 (2013), as the pal obsessed by moving to the US, that he showed the makings of a real movie star. His roots, however, are in theatre and revue – and in Guru he goes the whole hog as a comic, very physical entertainer, playing a self-possessed scam artist, Mei Yuangui, who gets women to fall for him so their partners can quietly break off the relationship.
The film is (very roughly) based on a 2010 stage play of the same name by 39-year-old, Xi’an-born playwright-scriptwriter Yu Baimei 俞白眉 (real name: Wu Tao 武涛), with whom Deng worked in the theatre, notably on the 2001 comic revue 翠花，上酸菜！ (“Cuihua, the Pickled Cabbage!”). In the original production the role of Mei Yuangui was played by stand-up comedian Cao Yunjin 曹云金, who doesn’t show up the movie; but other actors from the stage cast do, with Liang Chao 梁超 reprising the substantial role of the self-help guru Mei Yuangui starts working for, plus Zhao Manzhu 赵曼竹 as one of Mei Yuangui’s scam team and Yu’s wife Dai Lele 代乐乐 in a cameo as herself. Dai was one of the actresses who originally played the main female role, Ye Xiaochun – here entrusted to a much bigger movie name, Yang Mi 杨幂 (Tiny Times 1 小时代, 2013).
Yu, who wrote the script himself and co-directs with Deng, must share an equal part of the responsibility for the film’s overkill. In a prologue set in Mauritius – a foreign location being almost de rigueur in big Mainland productions nowadays – the jury is still out on which way the movie will unfold. With Deng playing a native in black-face, it has a Lost in Thailand-like feel in its broad comedy and exotic locations; but when, after a frenetic hold-up sequence back in China, the action settles down in Beijing, the farce dial still remains set at maximum as Deng and Liang’s characters camp it up in their first meeting. Finally, at the halfway mark, the real plot hoves into view as Mei Yuangui is told by Liang’s seedy entrepreneur to get Ye Xiaochun off his back so he can launch an IPO clear of any romantic involvement with a subordinate.
As a satire on New China’s conspicuous consumption, and the iron triangle of love-power-money, Guru is hardly new and feeds off the hyperbole of the things it’s meant to be sending up. That’s fine, too, for a commercial comedy; but what’s lacking from the midpoint is any emotional hook for the audience to become involved with its leads. At one point, Yang’s character looks like developing into a tragic cog in the two men’s wheels – a part the sad-kooky actress could have played sympathetically, given her past form; but this strand is never allowed to bloom as the pratfall comedy keeps coming thick and fast. Deng and Yang do have chemistry together – visible in small bits of comic business, like their play with a lighter – but it’s consistently submerged by Deng’s cartoony physical antics.
On a purely good-time level, the film does give value for money: for every gag that doesn’t work, another comes round the corner a few seconds later. And in its early stages it’s stuffed with cameos by celebrities playing themselves (including Deng’s actress wife, Sun Li 孙俪, and bad-boy writer Han Han 韩寒) to hook the home crowd. Guru could, however, have been much more: a touching rom-com rather than a knockabout comedy and – without overdoing the seriousness – a real commentary on the haves and have-nots in New China’s splashy metropolitan society. Technical credits are glossy throughout, with widescreen urban vistas by Du Jie 杜杰 (No Man’s Land 无人区, 2013) underlining Beijing’s cold, hard allure.
In several respects, the much more modest – and much quieter – rom-com The Break-Up Artist 分手达人 (2014), which centres on the same theme but with a woman in the lead, has more pleasurable moments. A remake of a 2009 US-Canadian film, it was shot in late 2010 but only released in 2014, two weeks before Guru, and promptly sank without trace, grossing less than 1% of Guru‘s humungous RMB660 million.
CREDITS
Presented by Beijing Enlight Pictures (CN), Tianjin Orange Image Media (CN), Shannan Enlight Pictures (CN), Shanghai Huixinghuiying Film & TV Culture Studio (CN). Produced by Beijing Enlight Pictures (CN).
Script: Yu Baimei. Play: Yu Baimei. Photography: Du Jie. Editing: Tu Yiran. Music: Liu Fengyue, Fu Wei, Wang Zhe. Music direction: Wang Zhe. Art direction: Sun Li. Costumes: You Ying. Styling consultation: Yu Jia’an [Bruce Yu], Tian Hongyu. Sound: Dong Xu. Action: Yuan De. Visual effects: Will Manning (Pixomondo).
Cast: Deng Chao (Mei Yuangui), Yang Mi (Ye Xiaochun), Liang Chao (Tang Dashan/Mountain Tang), Xu Kejia (Lao Liu/Six, Dashan’s bodyguard), Liu Yan (Zhu Li, Dashan’s wife), Gulnazar (Xiaozhuang), Qin Yue (Hei), Luan Yuanhui (Lulu), Zhao Manzhu (Spare Rib), Deng Xuedong (old man in wheelchair), Han Han, Sun Li, Jin Xing, Dai Lele, Yu Baimei, Cao Kefan, Wang Guan, Wu Jing, Xie Nan, Liu Yuanyuan, Shen Xue, Zhao Hongbo, Yu Baimei, Tian Hongyu, Wang Kai, Wang Zhen (themselves), Ji Zihan (young Xiaochun).
Release: China, 27 Jun 2014.
(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 4 Aug 2014.)