Wild Grass

荞麦疯长

China, 2020, colour, 2.35:1, 110 mins.

Director: Xu Zhanxiong 徐展雄.

Rating: 6/10.

Despite strong individual performances, especially by actresses Ma Sichun and Zhong Chuxi, this ambitious drama doesn’t cohere as a whole.

STORY

Hai city, eastern central China, the 1990s, summer. Li Mai (Zhong Chuxi) gives her final performance with the Hai City Modern Dance Troupe before leaving with her Japanese boyfriend Komura (Ryu Kohata) for Japan. Soon after leaving the theatre their car crashes into a motorcycle with two people on it. (That same summer, in Ci township, 85 kilometres away, bored Yun Qiao (Ma Sichun], who dreams of escaping to the big city, is caught shoplifting in a market and rescued by her elder sister Yun Shu [Gao Ye] who’s just returned from a long spell away in Hai city with her fiance Li Wenbin [Li Jie] in tow. That evening Yun Qiao’s wimpish boyfriend, foodstall-owner Qin Sheng [Xin Peng], is beaten up by town gangleader Zhao Si [Wang Zichen] and his men, who also steal his takings. Li Wenbin gives Yun Qiao the gift of a dress bu she’s rude to him; later, one afternoon, he rapes her at her family’s home. Yun Qiao decides to move to Hai city, with or without Qin Sheng, but he chooses to go with her. First, they go the HQ of Zhao Si’s gang to demand Qin Sheng’s money back; but there they find the whole gang slaughtered. After taking some money they leave, without seeing a young man with a knife hiding behind a pillar. Next day, after trashing Li Wenbin’s lottery stand in the town, they set off for Hai city by motorbike, arriving in the evening. At a crossroads they crash into the car carrying Li Mai and her boyfriend.) Li Mai survives the crash but ends up with nerve damage to her right thigh that rules her out from top-flight professional dance in the future. After she recovers, she’s told the Modern Dance Troupe can’t take her back as it’s about to be disbanded. In the meantime, her boyfriend Komura has left her. In a bar she meets a smooth Singaporean, Wang Hongming (Wang Yangming), who finds her a job dancing in a nightclub; after finding he owes money to gangsters, she pays them off but then Wang Hongming runs off to Singapore. When her father needs money to buy medicine for her mother, Li Mai tries for a high-paying job in a club run by gangster Commmander B (Wang Yanhui) but ends up as a dance-hall girl providing services to an old fantasist (Ren Luomin), who then dies in her room. She attempts suicide but returns to find the old man’s body gone. (Amateur trumpet-player Wu Feng [Huang Jingyu] and his pal Jinzi [Yang Yiwei] scrape a living in Hai city, including odd jobs for Commander B. Wu Feng’s flat faces on to Li Mai’s and he has long fantasised about her. Jinzi invites Wu Feng to go with him to Ci township on a job he says is on behalf of Commander B – collecting some money from Zhao Si’s gang. In fact, Jinzi is doing it for himself, and Zhao Si already knows as he’s checked with Commander B. In a bloody fight at Zhao Si’s HQ, only Wu Feng survives; when he hears Yun Qiao and Qin Sheng arriving, he hides behind a pillar. After six months on the run, he tries to knife Commander B in a dance hall but fails and manages to escape only with the help of a complete stranger – Yun Qiao, who’s working there as a dance-hall girl. They later talk and she says she’s about to go home to Ci township, as her boyfriend died the day they arrived in Hai city and after half a year none of her big-city dreams have come true. Wu Feng realises he has to finally confront Commander B and help his dream woman Li Mai.)

REVIEW

Despite a good cast – led by Ma Sichun 马思纯 and Zhong Chuxi 钟楚曦, two of China’s hottest younger actresses – giving of its best, Wild Grass 荞麦疯长 still fails to grasp the brass ring. An ambitious drama, centred on three people, about trying to realise one’s dreams in the Big City, it’s the first theatrical feature by writer-director Xu Zhanxiong 徐展雄, who previously contributed to the scripts of TV psychodrama Evil Minds 心理罪 (2015) and the long-delayed crime drama Ash 灰烬重生 (2017), as well as directing the hour-long online sci-fi potboiler 暗影特工局 (2016, literally, “Shadow Intelligence Department”, see poster, left). One of several films originally planned to be a Valentine’s Day release prior to the coronavirus shutdown, Wild Grass finally appeared in cinemas in late Aug, after premiering at the Shanghai festival a month earlier – but to very blah box office (RMB52 million).

Ash‘s writer-director Li Xiaofeng 李霄峰 is credited as script advisor on Grass and, like Ash, though in a different way, the film has an elaborate structure that hinders, as much as enhances, the drama. In Grass‘ case, the script is built as a series of (partly) overlapping stories, with incidents leading to flashbacks to explain how the characters reached those points. Thus, the film opens with a crash between a car and a motorcycle, backtracks for half-an-hour to explain how the motorcycle riders got there, resumes the story of the car’s occupants for half-an-hour, and then concentrates on the third character’s story, which turns out to be peripherally connected with the previous two. This is all very clever – and quite a common feature in Mainland films, especially crime dramas – but here it means that each of the central trio spends large chunks of time off-screen, only to suddenly pop up in another’s story – a structure that not only works against building any sustained drama but also hardly intertwines the three leads in the way it promises to.

It’s especially damaging in the case of the third main character, played by young actor Huang Jingyu 黄景瑜, whose story only properly starts an hour into the film. After an hour spent with the two female leads, the viewer is expecting the plot to develop around them, rather than effectively re-start with a new character. For Chinese viewers it’s even more disconcerting, as the film’s title is a wordplay on the two girls’ given names, Qiao 荞 and Mai 麦, which when combined make the Chinese word for “buckwheat” qiáomài that, per the rest of the title, overgrows but doesn’t bloom. However, any thoughts that Wild Grass may turn out to be a replay of the impressive SoulMate 七月与安生 (2016), in which two BFFs fall for the same man (and in which Ma, coincidentally co-starred), are soon dispelled at the hour mark.

Instead, Grass is really three separate stories that are given an artful, but basically spurious, patina of being connected and, for added atmosphere, are set in the 1990s rather than modern-day, glitzy China. There’s the bored, restless, smalltown girl (perfectly played by Ma with a carefree defiance) who dreams of the bright lights but only after a traumatic sexual encounter actually makes the move; a gifted modern-dancer in the Big City (strikingly played by Zhong, a onetime ballet student) whose career is suddenly hobbled, forcing her to become a jobbing dance-hall girl; and a Big City petty crook and chancer (Huang) whose life is unalterably changed by a friend’s invitation to a simple job. Alas, Ma’s character is virtually dumped once she reaches the city, only to pop up near the end and then provide the film’s book-end; Zhong’s character ends in an unresolved manner and in a very theatrical way; and Huang’s ditto. Both Ma and (especially) the smokey-looking Zhong (Youth 芳华, 2017; Dude’s Manual 脱单告急, 2018) etch memorable roles, with Huang (the arrogant challenger in Pegasus 飞驰人生, 2019) okay but not so striking. Among supporting roles, Wang Yanhui 王砚辉 is dependably good as a big-city gangster, Chinese American Wang Yangming 王阳明 [Sunny Wang] charismatic as a smooth-talking Singaporean, and Gao Ye 高叶 (Lethal Hostage 边境风云, 2012; Lost, Found 找到你, 2018) briefly notable as the elder sister of Ma’s character.

However, individual roles do not a movie make, especially one as ambitious as Grass. As in his sci-fi featurette, Xu wants to throw everything into the pot: the end credits include vox-pops with the public, and even the film’s crew, about making it away from one’s hometown (as piāobó 漂泊, migrant workers), and a further scene of characters almost meeting is also thrown in for good measure. Grass is not a hard film to sit through, and contains many individual pleasures; but it doesn’t add up to the sum of its contents. Widescreen photography by Zhong Rui 钟锐 (My Dear Liar 受益人, 2019) and the whole 1990s art direction and styling are both flavourful and natural-looking, especially in the smalltown scenes with its cassette tapes and lazy afternoons, and the music by the Mainland’s Zhu Boxuan 朱博譞 and Taiwan’s Lu Lvming 卢律铭 has a suitably dreamy, dark and contemplative flavour.

Shot during May-Aug 2018, Grass was largely filmed in Guojiatuo, Chongqing municipality, with some work in Shanghai, standing in for the fictional “Hai city”. Among the roster of talent attached to the film, Guan Hu 管虎 is credited as artistic supervisor and Taiwan’s Chen Zhengdao 陈正道 [Leste Chen] as creative producer 监制.

CREDITS

Presented by Shanghai Jingshu Culture Media (CN), Beijing Enlight Pictures (CN). Produced by Shanghai Jingshu Pictures (CN).

Script: Xu Zhanxiong. Script advice: Li Xiaofeng. Photography: Zhong Rui. Editing: Li Dianshi. Music: Zhu Boxuan, Lu Lvming. Art direction: Luo Shunfu, Shen Zhanzhi, Ye Guangzhen. Styling: Ye Zhuzhen. Sound: Xu Duo, Zhao Nan, Yang Jiang. Action: Luo Yimin [Norman Law]. Car stunts: Luo Yimin [Norman Law]. Visual effects: A Donglin, He Xuesong (Zhouren [Beijing] Culture Communication). Choreography: Xu Fangyi. Artistic supervisor: Guan Hu. Executive director: Ma Lei.

Cast: Ma Sichun (Yun Qiao), Zhong Chuxi (Li Mai), Huang Jingyu (Wu Feng/Fengzi), Wang Yanhui (Commander B), Wang Yangming [Sunny Wang] (Wang Hongming), Gao Ye (Yun Shu, Yun Qiao’s elder sister), Yang Yiwei (Jinzi), Xin Peng (Qin Sheng), Zhang Jianya (Li Mai’s taxi driver), Li Jie (Li Wenbin, Yun Shu’s fiance), Ryu Kohata (Komura, Li Mai’s Japanese boyfriend), Wu Chao (Hai City Modern Dance Troupe head), Niu Yinhong (Yun Qiao’s mother), Wang Zichen (Zhao Si, Ci township gang head), Li Weiting (Wang Er), Ren Luomin (randy old man), Zhang Jin (Wei Feng), Shao Shengjie (Qin Sheng’s father), Wang Jiaqiang (Sichuan kid), He Yunzhe (market security guard), Weiwei An [Vivienne Tien] (new tenant in Li Mai’s flat), Jiang Liangqi, Zhuo Yuxi (Li Mai’s co-dancers), He Lei (debt collector), Zhang Jingjing (hoodlums’ leader), Yan Feng (factory boss), Chloe (flower girl), Ding Hong (Li Mai’s doctor).

Premiere: Shanghai Film Festival (Asian New Talent Awards), 27 Jul 2020.

Release: China, 25 Aug 2020.