The Escaping Man
绑架毛乎乎
China, 2023, colour, 2.35:1, 103 mins.
Director: Wang Yichun 王一淳.
Rating: 6/10.
Strong performances sustain interest in this character study-cum-crime story, though the second half is less convincing in its plotting.
STORY
A city in northern China, the present day. Released from prison after 23 years for rape and persistent escaping, Ren Shengli (Jiang Wu) goes looking for his former girlfriend Shi Junxia (Zeng Meihuizi) in the village where she lived. Her aged, bedridden mother (Yan Zhao), who helped put Ren Shengli in prison by fabricating a rape case, reacts crazily when she sees him; but a young girl (Ma Yirui), Shi Junxia’s daughter by a man she had subsequently married and later divorced, gives Ren Shengli her mother’s address in the city. She is now working in a wealthy new district as a maid-cum-nanny to Mao Kunpeng, aka Mao Huhu (Zhang Boxin), the six-year-old son of Sun Xinru (Yan Ni), a lecturer in mind therapy, and her husband Ma Guangcai (Ren Long), a shady, unreliable entrepreneur. The snobbish Sun Xinru thinks Shi Junxia is a stupid, absent-minded malingerer but tolerates her as Ma Huhu, who has a very simplistic attitude to life, idolises her; Shi Junxia puts up with Sun Xinru’s insults as she was actually well educated at school and the job is a good one. When Ren Shengli turns up at the house, Shi Junxia is not pleased to see him and gently persuades him to leave. But after another humiliating experience with Sun Xinru – when the latter has a friend (Chen Jiayan) over for dinner and keeps criticising Shi Junxia’s cooking – Shi Junxia proposes to Ren Shengli that he kidnaps Mao Huhu and asks for a RMB1 million ransom. She says the amount is nothing to Sun Xinru and her husband, and she will do all the planning, insisting that she and Ren Shengli should never meet until the kidnap is over. When Mao Huhu goes to stay with his grandfather (Zheng Xiaomao) for a few days, Ren Shengli “kidnaps” the boy by pretending to be a friend of his parents; he takes him to a shabby house in a run-down area to spend the night. When Ren Shengli calls Sun Xinru with his demand, she initially thinks it’s a joke, as she’s more focused on getting Mao Huhu into the elite and very snobbish Darwin Primary School. As Shi Junxia predicted, Sun Xinru’s husband doesn’t dare report the kidnapping to the police as he has various shady business deals going on. Meanwhile, Mao Huhu is enjoying spending time with Ren Shengli, who caters to the boy’s over-active imagination. The next day, Sun Xinru drives to the trendy Shaqiu Art Gallery, where Ren Shengli arranges for her to see Mao Huhu from afar before handing over the ransom. After collecting the money, Ren Shengli drives off in his delivery buggy; but when Sun Xinru goes to collect her son, he’s no longer there. Unknown to Ren Shengli, Mao Huhu has hidden in his delivery buggy. And when Ren Shengli tries to deliver the boy to his grandfather, his buggy is taken away by the police with the ransom money still inside.
REVIEW
Like her first feature, period coming-of-ager What’s in the Darkness 黑处有什么 (2015), the second feature by Henan-born writer-director Wang Yichun 王一淳, 49, is a character study wrapped up in a crime story. This time, however, the crime aspect is considerably lighter and the characters way less dark, as an ex-convict becomes involved in his onetime girlfriend’s abduction of a rich couple’s young son to whom she’s a nanny (the film’s Chinese title means “Kidnapping Mao Huhu”). Strong, characterful playing by actor Jiang Wu 姜武, plus actresses Yan Ni 闫妮 and Zeng Meihuizi 曾美慧孜, sustain interest across the 100 or so minutes of The Escaping Man 绑架毛乎乎, though the second half is less convincing in its plotting. After competing in mid-2023 at the First Film Festival (where Darkness also premiered), it finally got a brief, week-long theatrical release two years later, taking a tiny RMB60,000, way less than it deserved.
As the ex-con who’s just been released after 23 years, Jiang is for much of the time a shadowy, ill-defined character, with the audience left in the dark whether Ren Shengli is a violent criminal or just a harmless rogue. After looking for his onetime girlfriend Shi Junxia (Zeng) – whose crazed mother once stitched him up on a rape case – he learns she’s now working in the big city as a maid/nanny to a wealthy couple with a young son. Initially Shi Junxia, who’s since been married and divorced, isn’t keen to see her old flame; but after yet another humiliation from the boy’s overbearing mother (Yan), a pompous lecturer in mind therapy who only puts up with Shi Junxia because her son dotes over her, Shi Junxia inveigles Ren Shengli in a scheme to “kidnap” the boy and squeeze RMB1 million out of his parents.
It soon becomes clear that Ren Shengli is being used by Shi Junxia to get even with the boy’s mother, whom she despises. Things are helped by the boy’s over-active imagination, and the fact that his parents have little real love for their son beyond using him as a status symbol: the mother, who simply wants to get him into a snobby primary school, actually thinks he’s an idiot, and that her shady businessman of a husband (the “father of my child”) is useless. The film is as much a critique of China’s new class structures among the wealthy upper middle class as it is a crime story, and the central relationships between Ren Shengli, Shi Junxia, the boy and his mother underline that at every point. If the second half is less convincing than the first, it’s because all the clever twists and turns in the plot get in the way of the developing character studies, and force the film in a less interesting direction.
Jiang, 58, who’s matured into a cross between a character actor and a leading man, is well cast here, by turns threatening and likeable, and believably creating a relationship with the boy in his charge (sympathetically played by young Zhang Boxin 张博鑫). The equally experienced Yan is aces as the self-absorbed mother, underplaying her selfishness; equally so is Guizhou-born Zeng (the young widow in The Pluto Moment 冥王星时刻, 2018; trashy ex-mistress in The Fallen Bridge 断•桥, 2022), also underplaying the working-class maid who’s looked down on by her employer but is naturally very clever, a woman who never got a real chance in life.
Shot in 2020 in Beijing, the film is set in an unnamed city somewhere in northern China. Technical credits are modest and unobtrusive, led by the cool widescreen visuals of d.p. Li You 李优 (stylish whodunit Revival 回廊亭, 2023). The use of animated inserts to portray the boy Mao Huhu’s over-active imagination are distracting and would better have been left out. Also, the film’s English title is meaningless and needs to be changed.
CREDITS
Presented by Henan J&S Pictures (CN).
Script: Wang Yichun. Photography: Li You. Editing: Wang Peichong. Music supervision: Chen Xiaoshu. Art direction: Liu Jing. Styling: Liu Jing. Sound: Gang Yang, Hao Gang. Action: Li Xin. Visual effects: Liu Peiyu, Yu Lizheng. Animation: Wang Mitong. Artistic direction: Kong Lizhi, Yan Ming.
Cast: Jiang Wu (Ren Shengli), Yan Ni (Sun Xinru), Zeng Meihuizi (Shi Junxia), Zhang Boxin (Mao Kunpeng/Mao Huhu), Ren Long (Ma Guangcai), Lin Jiachuan (Tom, security-team captain), Chen Weixin (security-team vice-captain), Sang Ping (Ding Jun, delivery man), Li Zenghui (fortune-teller), Chen Jiayan (Sun Xinru’s female friend), Zheng Xiaomao (Mao Huhu’s grandfather), Wang Xinhua (Ren Shengli’s landlady), Yan Zhao (Shi Junxia’s mother), Ma Yirui (Shi Junxia’s daughter), Gao Hongtai (security head), Chen Jin (Xiaoyan, Ma Guangcai’s assistant), Lv Jianwei (Darwin Primary School headmaster), An Na (Jin Yang, TV newscaster).
Premiere: First Film Festival (Competition), Xining, China, 25 Jul 2023.
Release: China, 11 Aug 2025.