Nezha

少女哪吒

China, 2014, colour, 2.35:1, 98 mins.

Director: Li Xiaofeng 李霄峰.

Rating: 5/10

Promising story of a female rebel and her bosom pal squanders its early promise.

STORY

Baocheng, central China, the early 1990s. Li Xiaolu (Li Haofei), the daughter of a construction worker, arrives as a transfer student at Baocheng High School and immediately bonds with the rebellious Wang Xiaobing (Li Jiaqi), the class monitor. Wang Xiaobing doesn’t get on with her mother, Xu Wanqing (Chen Jin), a devotee of Huangmei Opera who teaches at the school, and is distant with her father, Wang Yinghua (Wang Yong), who is separating from his wife and moving to the provincial capital due to his affaire with another woman. Depressed, Wang Xiaobing one day walks into the river and is saved from drowning by Xu Jie (Xin Peng), a fellow student who studies martial arts. He is friendly towards Li Xiaolu, though she tells Wang Xiaobing that she’s not interested in him. The two girls now have a very close friendship but, when Li Xiaolu insults a chemistry teacher (Ding Pei) in class, she is expelled and transferred to Yingcai High School. Wang Xiaobing worries whether they’ll lose touch once they’re separated. Some time later, Wang Xiaobing has transferred to a nursing school; visiting Li Xiaolu at her new high school, she gets upset when she thinks Li Xiaolu is romancing a fellow pupil. While training as a cadet at a military academy, Wang Xiaobing, now 16, falls for her instructor, Li Danyang (Li Huan), who rejects her in a friendly way before being transferred. Later, aged 18, she starts working as an intern in a hospital’s gynaecological and obstetrics department. She still dreams of joining the army to be with Li Danyang, though her mother tries to make her see sense. She contacts Li Xiaolu, who tells her she’s mad. And at a gathering of her family, relatives and former high-school teacher Lin (Chen Yongjian) to discuss her behaviour, Wang Xiaobing completely loses control.

REVIEW

A film that starts coming apart midway as fast as the female friendship on which it centres, Nezha 少女哪吒 starts with considerable promise before falling prey to chaotic scripting and directorial conceits. It marks the directing debut of Li Xiaofeng 李霄峰, who studied filmmaking in Brussels and went on to play the male lead in and co-write Dada’s Dance 达达 (Zhang Yuan 张元, 2008). Originally to have been produced by Zhang when still at project stage, Nezha has ended up as a beautifully shot calling card for Beijing-based, Dutch-Chinese d.p.-musician-director Joewi Verhoeven 中伟, with a strong performance by young newcomer Li Jiaqi 李嘉琪, 19, in the title role of a rebellious teenager. But with the central relationship going nowhere after the first 40 minutes, and often baffling continuity thereafter, Li Xiaofeng clearly needs some basic lessons in script construction if he is to progress as a director. [Box office was a microscopic RMB544,000.]

The movie is an adaptation of a 2012 novella of the same name by writer-TV presenter Lv Yao 绿妖 (a pen name meaning “green demon”) that stretches from the two girls meeting and bonding at high school in 1993, through their gradual seperation by events thereafter, to the return home by one of them in 2008, aged 30. Written in an abstract style, in the form of letters to each other, its theme is a familar one of Lv’s – the difficulties experienced by independent-minded, demanding female characters in a world they regard as bound by convention.

Where the book was set in Henan province, Li has relocated it slightly further south to his native Anhui province, west of Shanghai, with Wuhu, on the banks of the Yangtze River, standing in for the fictional Baocheng. Opening in the first half of the 1990s, when New China was starting to forge a fresh identity both socially and economically, it exactly captures in its attitudes – and through the simple but effective art direction of Zhong Cheng 钟诚 – an era of nascent individuality and breaks with the past. Spunky young transfer student Li Xiaolu, who even drags her own desk into her new school, immediately bonds with classmate Wang Xiaobing, a very possessed fellow rebel who’s alienated from her parents (a teacher mother who’s in the process of divorcing her philandering husband) and believes anyone who doesn’t live their life with honesty and a total lack of compromise is a “hypocrite”.

Early scenes of the two larking around have a slightly fresher feel from the high-school-film norm, thanks to the lack of music to soup up Verhoeven’s widescreen visuals and the actresses’ low-key chemistry. Without sacrificing her own strengths, 15-year-old newcomer Li Haofei 李浩菲, as the plain Li Xiaolu, quietly complements Li Jiaqi’s more attractive but less compromising Wang Xiaobing, and their bonding has an edge that’s completely free of any girly BFF-ing. Even when a boy – lightly played by Xin Peng 辛鹏 as a martial arts student who’s mad over wuxia novels – enters their realm, the slight tensions aren’t played up in an obvious way.

It’s when the two start to be geographically separated – following Li Xiaolu’s transfer to another school – that the movie also starts losing its mojo, with jumps in time, an increasing focus on Wang Xiaobing, and unexplained developments that tax the viewer’s comprehension. (What exactly is Wang Xiaobing, last seen at a nursing school, doing at a military academy, for instance?) As the film diverges more and more from its source material, it loses one of its central themes – the girl’s teenage promise to each other that they’ll never get married – as well as masses of subsidiary detail, to a point where it looks like a much longer movie that’s been edited to the bone. When Wang Xiaobing’s family and relatives arrange a summit meeting to sort out her erratic behaviour following her no-go romance with an army instructor (Li Huan 李欢, good), it’s almost impossible to work out who’s who and what’s been going on. The film’s flashback structure, which starts with scenes of a young woman’s body in a mortuary and then cuts to the older Li Xiaolu returning home to visit her erstwhile bosom pal, only adds to the structural confusion.

Added to all of this is an increasing pretentiousness in Li Xiaofeng’s staging of scenes that’s at variance with the naturalness of the opening half-hour. It’s particularly noticeable in the scenes of Wang Xiaobing and her parents – otherwise well played by Chen Jin 陈瑾  and Wang Yong 王勇 – but later spreads beyond that. More’s the shame, as Verhoeven’s precise compositions and subtle use of natural light form a consistently attractive frame for the cast. Music, by US composer Drew Hanratty, is sparingly used until the end titles; most is source music for Wang Xiaobing’s interest in classical music and her mother’s in Huangmei Opera.

Nezha is an unruly male deity in Chinese mythology who committed suicide and was reborn as a more filial character. The film’s Chinese title literally means “Nezha Girl”, and could roughly be translated as “Rebel Girl”. Its original English title was Scrape My Bone, referring to one aspect of Nezha’s gory suicide.

CREDITS

Presented by Way Good Entertainment (CN), Beijing BHBD Culture Diffusion (CN), Engine Capital Management (CN), Fantasy Entertainment (CN). Produced by Beijing BHBD Culture Diffusion (CN), Way Good Entertainment (CN).

Script: Li Xiaofeng, Wang Mu, Pan Yu. Novella: Lv Yao. Photography: Joewi Verhoeven. Editing: Liu Yueyue. Music: Drew Hanratty. Art direction: Zhong Cheng. Costumes: Yang Yang. Sound: Lu Ke, Liu Xiaosheng. Martial arts: Zhang Zebin.

Cast: Li Jiaqi (Wang Xiaobing), Li Haofei (Li Xiaolu), Chen Jin (Xu Wanqing, Wang Xiaobing’s mother), Xin Peng (Xu Jie), Li Huan (Li Danyang), Zhang Zheng (older Li Xiaolu), Chen Yongjian (Lin, teacher), Wang Jinwei (Li Xiaolu’s father), Zhu Weiwei (Li Xiaolu’s mother), Zhang Zheng (Zhang, section chief), Wang Yong (Wang Yinghua, Wang Xiaobing’s father), Liu Yanting (Tang Hui, Li Xiaolu’s classmate), Ding Pei (chemistry teacher), Wang Yuewen (headmaster), Su Yutian (nursing school teacher), Hua Jun (Zhao, doctor), Huang Di (Yang Xuanhui, Wang Yinghua’s fiancee), Du Xiaozhu (Wang Xiaobing’s grandmother), Wang Liang (Wang Xiaobing’s maternal uncle), Zhu Tongju (Wang Xiaobing’s aunt), Zhao Yang, Zhang Bochao (census takers).

Premiere: Busan Film Festival (New Currents), 5 Oct 2014.

Release: China, 11 Jul 2015.

(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 15 Oct 2014.)