Saving Mother Robot

玛德2号

Taiwan/China/Hong Kong, 2012, colour, 2.35:1, 86 mins.

Director: Zhu Jialin 朱家麟.

Rating: 6/10.

Family fantasy-comedy packs plenty of charm between the cracks of an untidy script.

STORY

Taibei, late Dec 2012. The city is going through an unprecedented winter heatwave, with temperatures in the 30s. Eight-year-old Tiger (Antoine) lives with his divorced mother, Cao Yi (Xu Ruoxuan), 36, who is struggling to make ends meet with her job as a magazine editor and reduced alimony payments from her ex-husband (Tang Guozhong). Tiger, who has a hyper-active imagination and sees his mother as a run-down robot who needs a new model, is not very bright at school and worries his art teacher (Yang Mi) with the dark pictures he draws in class. Against her will, Cao Yi is assigned by her slave-driver boss (Zeng Zhiwei) to accompany a visiting photographer, Xiaotie (Huang Xiaoming), who has come to do a wildlife feature on how the Red Kite is being affected by the unseasonal weather. In fact, he’s doing some private research on UFOs, in which he believed as a kid. As Xiaotie spends more time with Cao Yi and Tiger, he finds he has a lot in common with the boy’s hyper-active imagination and also starts to take a liking to the mother. Then Tiger gets it into head that his “robot” mother is slowly breaking down, and sets out on a mission to “rescue” her.

REVIEW

After two TV movies (the reflective Old Time Photo Studio 旧情照相馆, 2011, and Finding Anthony 公主与王子, 2012), Taiwan writer-director Zhu Jialin 朱家麟 makes an interesting big-screen feature debut with Saving Mother Robot 玛德2号, a family/kids’ fantasy in which the performances and a sense of old-fashioned innocence help to paper over the cracks in an untidy script. Slickly packaged by Hong Kong d.p. Wang Jincheng 王金城 (Revenge: A Love Story 复仇者之死, 2010; 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy 3D肉蒲团之极乐宝鉴, 2011) and editor Li Dongquan 李栋全 [Wenders Li], and given a slightly candy-coloured look by Taiwan production designer Guo Zhida 郭志达  (Secret 不能说的秘密, 2007; The Stolen Years 被偷走的那五年, 2013), it’s a film that’s too full of ideas for its own good but does manage to charm at a basic, uncomplicated level.

From the start, Zhu plunges the viewer into a world that’s set on the border between fantasy and reality, much like the mind of the main character, eight-year-old ragamuffin Tiger. The setting is a big city that’s unnamed but clearly Taibei; the time is late December but there’s an extraodinary heatwave, with temperatures in the 30s. Meanwhile, Tiger, raised by his divorced mother who’s harried at home and at work, has fantasies about White Christmases and how his mum is actually a run-down robot who needs an upgrade. (The film’s original title means “Mother 2.0”, but using a foreign homonym for “mother”.) Zhu’s Finding Anthony focused on an older but similar character who’d retreated into a fantasy world to compensate for parental absence and neglect, and then set out to find a Prince Charming via a dating site. In Robot, Tiger starts to bond with a visiting photographer who had a childhood a little like his, and also shares a love of toy robots and UFOs. Mmm, right.

Zhu and co-writer Cai Yifen 蔡怡芬 – who wrote Miao Miao 渺渺 (2008) as well as Zhu’s Old Time Photo Studio – don’t really assemble all these elements into a convincing whole. Animated inserts – halfway between Pixar and kids’ anime in look – show Tiger’s imaginings about his “robot” mother but are never smoothly integrated into the main narrative or even make much sense. There are several hints that Tiger himself (likeably played by mop-haired, half-Brazilian child actor Antoine) is actually a pretty disturbed kid – or so his sexy art teacher (Mainland hottie Yang Mi 杨幂 in a two-scene cameo) would have us believe. And the fact that the arrogant visiting photographer – presumably from China, as he’s played by Mainland star Huang Xiaoming 黄晓明 – also had a disturbed childhood involving toy robots, UFOs and a dead mother is an even bigger stretch. To top everything off, the film then fabricates a finale out of Tiger going off to “rescue” his “robot” mum (shown like the stages in a computer game, but never properly explained) and his actual mum having a sudden health reversal that’s straight out of daytime TV drama.

However, despite all this, the movie undeniably has a basic, ingenuous charm that’s hard to resist – and earns it an extra point. Though Huang (An Inaccurate Memoir 匹夫, 2012; The Guillotines 血滴子, 2012; American Dreams in China 中国合伙人, 2013) again shows he can pretty much take on any role nowadays and give it a gleam of its own through sheer force of personality, the movie actually belongs to top-billed Taiwan actress Xu Ruoxuan 徐若瑄 [Vivian Hsu], now in her late 30s, whose “comeback” in recent years as an actress has revealed some interesting performances in films like Juliets 茱丽叶 (2010) and Sleepless Fashion 与时尚同居 (2011). Playing a harrassed, Plain Jane mum in big-framed glasses and untidy hair, but not in an exaggerated goofy way, Xu nicely underplays the film’s incipient rom-com elements opposite Huang and has equally good chemistry with local Taiwan actors like Yang Jinhua 杨谨华 as her eccentric pal.

Among the bevy of other local names like Guan Ying 关颖 [Terri Kwan] (in a tiny cameo as the photographer’s aunt) and character actors like Jiu Kong 九孔 and the late Lin Zongren 林宗仁 (as a bozo security guard and an old Hokkien tea-seller), the movie still finds space to fit in Greater China’s busiest actor, Hong Kong veteran Zeng Zhiwei 曾志伟 [Eric Tsang]. Not for the first time in his career, Zeng flounces his way through a one-scene cameo, as the gay boss of Xu’s character.

Among various English titles, the film was also known during production as Mother Android II. The recipient of a 2008 Taiwan script prize, it was shot in the summer of 2011.

CREDITS

Presented by Polyface Movies (TW), Stellar Mega Films (CN), Vision Film Workshop Company (TW), Film Kid Films (TW), Vision Film Workshop Ltd. (HK). Produced by Vision Film Workshop Company (TW), Film Kid Films (TW).

Script: Zhu Jialin, Cai Yifen. Photography: Wang Jincheng. Editing: Li Dongquan [Wenders Li]. Music: Zhao Zengxi, Zhang Renjie. Production design: Guo Zhida. Art direction: Ning Huaide. Styling: Zhang Peizhen. Sound: Gao Weiyan, Zheng Xuzhi. Visual effects: Su (Hi-Organic Studio).

Cast: Xu Ruoxuan [Vivian Hsu] (Cao Yi), Huang Xiaoming (Xiaotie), Zeng Zhiwei [Eric Tsang] (Cao Yi’s boss), Yang Mi (Yang, Tiger’s art teacher), Antoine (Xiaohu/Tiger), Tang Guozhong (Cao Yi’s ex-husband), Wang Kaidi (secretary of Cao Yi’s boss), Yang Jinhua (Fangfang, Cao Yi’s best friend), Ding Shasha (TV weather forecaster), Qiu Yucheng (Damao/Cat, Fangfang’s son), Hu Weijie (Curly, Fangfang’s nephew), Jiu Kong [Lv Kongwei] (Cai, medical school security guard), Lin Zongren (Bear-Hat Lin, herbal teashop owner), Wu Min (fortune teller), Guan Ying [Terri Kwan] (Xiaotie’s aunt), Dan Dan (young Xiaotie), Qian Demen (Human Meat, baozi seller), Kitamura Toyoharu (energy guru).

Premiere: Shanghai Film Festival (Spectrum), 16 Jun 2013.

Release: Taiwan, 9 Aug 2013; China, 9 Aug 2013; Hong Hong, tba.

(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 2 Aug 2013.)