Embrace Again
穿过寒冬拥抱你
China, 2021, colour, 2.35:1, 123 mins.
Director: Xue Xiaolu 薛晓路.
Rating: 5/10.
“Inspirational” light drama, about volunteers in Wuhan during the Covid lockdown, is rescued by its starry cast.
STORY
Wuhan city, Hubei province, central China, 24 Jan 2020. It is Chinese New Year’s Eve and, as of 10:00 the previous day, the city has been locked down, following the National Health Commission receiving reports from 25 provinces and municipalities of 571 confirmed cases of a new coronavirus. People had been trying to leave the city and there had been panic buying in food shops. A Yong 阿勇. Yong (Huang Bo), a driver at transport company Hanyun Express tries organising volunteers but is met with hostility and cynicism by his workmates, especially as it’s New Year’s Eve. He spends the day driving doctors and nurses around, sleeping at work and only communicating with his son by phone. More than 10 days later he’s still doing the same, working ceaselessly and leaving bags of food at the door of his flat. His wife is still blocking his calls in anger. Wu Ge 武哥. Motorbike delivery woman Wu Ge (Jia Ling), “Big Brother Wu”, is a hearty and overweight divorcee whose daughter is living in Shenzhen with her father. On New Year’s Eve she accepts a RMB300 bid to buy and deliver some medicine to Ye Ziyang (Zhu Yilong), a piano teacher, but when she gets there he suddenly passes out. She takes him to hospital and then back home, and the two start a friendship. He’s also divorced, with a child who’s living with his ex-wife in Shenzhen. Wu Ge later befriends Xia Xiao (Zhou Dongyu), a hard-working young nurse from elsewhere in China who’s dying to taste a local speciality, sanxian doupi 三鲜豆皮; in thanks, Xia Xiao encourages Wu Ge in her friendship with handsome young Ye Ziyang. “Old Li and His Wife” 老李夫妇. By New Year’s Eve the tourism business of Liu Yulan (Xu Fan) is in trouble as customers demand refunds and staff is laid off at home. The grocery chain of her husband Li Hongyu (Gao Yalin) has also been hit. The couple hear by phone from their daughter Li Jun (Qiao Xin), who’s been stranded in New Zealand with a fellow traveller, Zhang Zhe (Liu Haoran), that everything is okay. The couple start working as volunteers. Three weeks later Liu Yulan gets a government refund on lost business, but the same evening she hears sad news about an old friend, Gao, whom she’d earlier nagged for money. “Grandma” 奶奶. It is New Year’s Eve and Xie Yongqin (Wu Yanshu), a veteran hospital surgeon who retired to look after her son-in-law and his young son Benben, is preparing a meal for them. She’s now widowed and hears from Pei (Xu Shaoxiong), a dear old Cantonese friend who’s a chef. He starts work as a volunteer, cooking meals to donate to medical staff, and she eventually goes back to work at hospital. On Valentine’s Day the two finally go out together. By Mar 2020 the situation in Wuhan has improved and on 10 Mar factories re-open. Yong and Wu Ge rescue a pregnant cat; Liu Yulan receives some happy news; Wu Ge hears some sad news; and Pei hears some news about Xie Yongqin. On 8 Apr 2020 the city’s lockdown finally ends. And later there’s a mixture of good and bad news among the group of characters.
REVIEW
An “inspirational” light drama set around the Wuhan lockdown in early 2020, and the work of volunteers during it, Embrace Again 穿过寒冬拥抱你 has a similar structure to the Mainland’s first major Covid drama, Chinese Doctors 中国医生 (2021), released five months earlier, but a lighter, less doctrinaire tone and lower-key stories. Without being anything special, and sometimes not even that, it’s at least an improvement on the previous two outings of writer-director Xue Xiaolu 薛晓路 – the weakest segment of all in the portmanteau My People, My Country 我和我的祖国 (2019) and the flop international action-thriller The Whistleblower 吹哨人 (2019), starring Lei Jiayin 雷佳音 and Tang Wei 汤唯. If nothing else, Xue has had her box-office fortunes restored by Embrace, which took a hunky RMB937 million during the 2021/22 New Year period.
Beijing-born Xue, 51, came to attention with her first feature, autism drama Ocean Heaven 海洋天堂 (2010), which still remains her best film and is certainly more original and more naturally calibrated than the derivative, US-set rom-coms Finding Mr. Right 北京遇上西雅图 (2013) and Book of Love 北京遇上西雅图之不二情书 (2016), both starring Wu Xiubo 吴秀波 and Tang. Xue initially trained as a writer but, apart from Ocean, all her other films have failed on a script level. Embrace has a similar gaucheness and artificiality in its writing but, like Ocean, just about gets by thanks to the performances of most of the big-name cast.
For whatever reason, Xue has gone with an almost entirely new creative team, retaining only the experienced Hong Kong stylist Wu Lilu 吴里璐 [Dora Ng] and editor Kuang Zhiliang 邝志良. For a writer who’s so far worked either alone or with Jiao Huajing 焦华静, this time she’s brought in a veritable posse of co-scripters, including Wuhan-born Liu Qing 柳青 (online feature Ladies in Beijing 北京女子图鉴之助理女王, 2019) and Beijing Film Academy teacher Zhang Bolei 张铂雷 (Uyghur drama Blissful Sunflower 幸福的向日葵, 2011). It’s also Xue’s first film, after a run of three, without actress Tang.
The film starts with a brief reminder of the situation, when Wuhan went into a Draconian lockdown on the morning of 23 Jan 2020, just prior to Chinese New Year, after over 500 cases had been reported across China of a new coronavirus. The main protagonists are sketched in four episodes (each about 13-15 minutes long) which start on 24 Jan and go through to mid-Feb, with the final 20 minutes marking the end of lockdown and the characters’ eventual fates. In a common device used in such films, the characters and stories peripherally overlap. It’s all unashamedly positive, heartwarming and inspirational, showing a city fending with a total shutdown of transport and most business but finally emerging from it in early April with a mixture of joy and tragedy. The film’s Chinese title literally means “Embrace You throughout the Cold Winter”.
In dramatic terms, however, it’s uneven. Goofy comic Huang Bo 黄渤 is the initial motor, as a selfless delivery driver who exhorts his workmates to become volunteers (for which he’s met by a wave of cynicism, on Chinese New Year’s Eve) and himself works round the clock shuttling medical staff and supplies round the city. It’s an impossible role that Huang just about manages to keep human thanks to his light comic skills (playing at being a martial arts hero for his young son) and battered, everyman looks. Ditto theatre/TV comedienne Jia Ling 贾玲 (director and star of mega-hit Hi, Mom 你好，李焕英, 2021) in a manufactured almost-a-love-story between a divorced, overweight delivery woman and a divorced, handsome piano teacher (Zhu Yilong 朱一龙), with a cameo role thrown into the middle by Zhou Dongyu 周冬雨 as a cute, hard-working nurse who loves Wuhan doupi 豆皮.
The third story, centred on a wealthy middle-aged couple (Gao Yalin 高亚麟, Xu Fan 徐帆) whose businesses are hit by the lockdown, is the weakest written as well as being over-acted; better is the fourth, with the Mainland’s busiest octagenarian actress, Wu Yanshu 吴彦姝, as a widowed surgeon looking after her son-in-law and grandson who finds succour via an old Cantonese friend (onetime Du Qifeng 杜琪峰 [Johnnie To] regular Xu Shaoxiong 许绍雄) who also becomes a volunteer. This episode, especially, is saved from becoming a melodramatic tear-jerker by the leads’ dignified, restrained playing.
Like the recent B for Busy 爱情神话 (2021), the film was shot in a local-dialect version, in this case Wuhanese (not that far removed from standard Mandarin), which Huang, a northerner from Qingdao, learnt especially for his role. Though not a Wuhan native, Jia was born in the same province and already familiar with the dialect/accent, while actors like Zhu and Xu were born in the city. The decision to shoot a dialect version greatly increases the sense of verisimilitude, especially given the starry cast, though it still doesn’t hide the artificiality of some of the script. Widescreen photography by top Mainland d.p. Li Bingqiang 李炳强 (Fleet of Time 勿勿那年, 2014; Be Somebody 扬名立万, 2021) makes extensive use of exteriors while rarely positioning the stories around local landmarks, raising the question of how much of the film was actually shot in Wuhan itself. Editing by top cutters Zhang Yifan 张一凡 and Hong Kong’s Kuang is tight and fluid enough, though the whole film could easily have been 15 minutes shorter. Only the first two stories have official English titles on the film; those for the other two in the synopsis above are translations, and have been put in quotation marks.
CREDITS
Presented by China Film (CN), Alibaba Pictures (Beijing) (CN), Hubei Changjiang Huasheng Film & TV (CN).
Script: Xue Xiaolu, Liu Qing, Zhang Bolei, Hao Zhe, Wang Yue. Photography: Li Bingqiang. Editing: Zhang Yifan, Kuang Zhiliang. Art direction: Li Jianwei. Styling: Wu Lilu [Dora Ng]. Sound: Zhao Nan, Yang Jiang.
Cast: Huang Bo (Yong), Jia Ling (Wu Ge), Zhu Yilong (Ye Ziyang, piano teacher), Xu Fan (Liu Yulan), Gao Yalin (Li Hongyu, Liu Yulan’s husband), Wu Yanshu (Xie Yongqin), Xu Shaoxiong (Pei), Zhou Dongyu (Xia Xiao, nurse), Liu Haoran (Zhang Zhe), Qiao Xin (Li Jun, Li Hongyu and Liu Yalan’s daughter), Wang Xiao (Ma Jie), Sang Ping (Zhao Hu), Zhang Taiwei (security man), Wang Yi’nan, Liu Tianzuo, Tian Xiaojie, Sun Qian, Zhang Youhao, Shang Yuxian, Han Tiantian, Lu Siyu, Zhou Pinrui.
Release: China, 31 Dec 2021.