Mr. Zhu’s Summer
猪太狼的夏天
China, 2017, colour, 2.35:1, 87 mins.
Director: Song Haolin 宋灏霖.
Rating: 5/10.
Light character study of a primary-school teacher with a chronic lack of self-assurance is well-played and precisely directed but too slim for feature length.
STORY
Qingdao, northern China, the present day. Zhu Tailang (Sun Bo) is a Grade Five teacher at Guangming Road Primary School who’s amiable but cannot enforce discipline in his class. He lives with his girlfriend Yanyan (Xu Wei), with whom he’s been together for seven or eight years. A mutual friend, Xiaofan (Jia Xiaoshuang), urges them to get married, and persuades Zhu Tailang to leave his present job and work at a private school. Zhu Tailang tells Guangming’s headmaster (He Yunqing), who doesn’t object; but he warns him that private schools can be very competitive and questions whether Zhu Tailang is up to the challenge. Zhu Tailang still has a couple of months to go at Guangming and feels he’s floating in a void. His go-getting friend Cheng (Liu Xuetao), who works in TV, advises him to man up and release his “full potential”. Zhu Tailang takes the unconventional step of getting his class to write essays about themselves. One, Zha Meng (Li Haoze), a loner who comes from a wealthy family but whose father is always away on business, submits an audio essay in which he confesses he never knew his mother and his closest friend was his maid Auntie Liu. Impressed by the essay, Zhu Tailang broadcasts it to the whole class without first telling Zha Meng, who gets very upset. Zhu Tailang is heavily criticised by the other teachers. When Zha Meng and his thick friend Jin Gang (Wang Jixian) cause trouble with one of the school’s staff, their fathers are called in; but Zha Meng’s father (Wang Yiwei) is always on his mobile phone and Jin Gang’s (Yuan Wenfei) just prattles nonsense. The two kids later redeem themselves when seen helping an old man in the street, and Cheng even puts them and Zhu Tailang on his TV show. Just before broadcast, however, Zhu Tailang learns the truth of what happened, and the TV show ends up as a PR disaster. Zhu Tailang is suspended for the remainder of his time at Guangming and loses his chance to join the private school. But now his class starts to miss him, so Zha Meng and Jin Gang hatch a plan to prove that the TV debacle was not Zhu Tailang’s fault.
REVIEW
Likeable but slim, Mr. Zhu’s Summer 猪太狼的夏天 was a promising theatrical debut by Shandong-born actor-turned-director Song Haolin 宋灏霖, then 39, following his striking online feature Fatal Love 所爱非人 (2016), released the year before. A light character study of a primary-school teacher who suffers from a chronic lack of self-assurance, it shows the same precision in both direction and visual composition as Fatal Love but is stretched way beyond its content. Box office was a microscopic RMB282,000.
One of its creative producers 监制 was popular comedian/film-maker Xu Zheng 徐峥, and the film may have had more of an impact if he had played the leading role, which seems tailored for his brand of shy light comedy. In fact, with his bald head and coy smile, Sun Bo 孙博, a theatre actor-writer-director who’s made only a handful of (little-known) movies, ends up doing an almost perfect imitation of Xu – begging the question of whether the role was originally intended for the major star. Whatever the case, Sun carves a sympathetic character but is let down by a screenplay that doesn’t dig down into his role very far and contains only a small amount of drama to fill out an hour-and-a-half.
Fatal Love, which premiered at the Shanghai festival in Jun 2016 and was then released on the iQiyi platform in Oct, was a strikingly assured debut by Song, shot in widescreen and with only two actors playing a wife, an inventor husband, and a robot who takes over the husband’s role. Blackly comic and with several inventive twists, it still, however, felt a little long at 74 minutes – and Mr. Zhu could equally have come in at featurette length of around 50-55 minutes.
There is, indeed, enough material here for a 90-minute feature, as Mr. Zhu, spending his last summer at a state primary before transferring to a private school, finds his authority seriously undermined by two pupils, the lonely but rebellious son of a wealthy businesman and the thick, dumpy son of a working-class family. But both of those characters – along with Mr. Zhu’s tolerant, eternal girlfriend (likeably played by Xu Wei 徐唯) – are only marginally developed, and the film as a whole lacks a strong enough dramatic arc to support the charming but flimsy content.
Technical credits are strong, from the precise widescreen photography of d.p. Hu Mingjue 胡铭觉 (Fatal Love) to the simple but effective scoring by Wu Tao 吴涛.
CREDITS
Presented by Beijing Joywood Pictures (CN), Beijing Joy Leader Culture Communication (CN). Produced by Beijing Joywood Pictures (CN), Beijing Joy Leader Culture Communication (CN).
Script: Song Haolin. Photography: Hu Mingjue. Editing: Yu Hongchao. Music: Wu Tao. Art direction: Peng Shaoying. Costumes: Zhang Weiru, Zhang Bingyue. Styling: Wang Xing. Sound: Wang Baoran, Li Xuelei.
Cast: Sun Bo (Zhu Tailang), Li Haoze (Zha Meng/Zhameng/Grasshopper), Wang Jixian (Jin Gang/King Kong), Liu Xuetao (Cheng), Xu Wei (Yanyan), He Yunqing (headmaster), Li Hongwei (school director), Yuan Wenfei (Jin Gang’s father), Li Yan (Jin Gang’s mother), Wang Yiwei (Zha Meng’s father), Jia Xiaoshuang (Xiaofan).
Premiere: WorldFest Houston, 22 Apr 2017.
Release: China, 10 Nov 2017.