Nice View
奇迹 笨小孩
China, 2022, colour, 1.85:1, 104 mins.
Director: Wen Muye 文牧野.
Rating: 7/10.
Young actor-singer Yi Yangqianxi makes a strong lead as a do-or-die entrepreneur in this CNY heartwarmer.
STORY
Shenzhen, southern China, 2013. Following the death of their mother, Jing Hao (Yi Yangqianxi), 20, and his six-year-old sister Jing Tong (Chen Halin) have moved to Shenzhen to take advantage of the opportunities there. Jing Hao has opened a small mobile-phone repair shop and Jing Tong has begun her education at the local primary school. However, a doctor (Yang Xinming) warns Jing Hao that Jing Tong, who has a heart disease partly inherited from her mother, needs surgery before she reaches the age of eight. He urges Jing Tong to raise the money, some RMB350,000. Jing Tong asks the advice of a hometown friend, Tao Zhiyong (Zhu Junlin), who works a forklift in a warehouse, and the latter shows him a huge pile of boxes of SNE mobiles that were sent back from Italy because of defects and are still there as the seller abandoned them. Jing Tong is told he can have them all for RMB100,000, and he realises he could cannibalise them for parts in an old-for-new mobile exchange business. Jing Hao gets a 30-day loan of RMB50,000 on the collateral of his shop’s contents, and orders start to pile up. However, two weeks later the authorities outlaw mobile retreads and fakes, and Jing Hao’s business model is wiped out. After being blocked by one of SNE’s managers (Wang Chuanjun), Jing Tao manages to get 10 minutes on a train with the company’s head, Zhao Zhenchang (Zhang Zhijian), who, recognising the young man’s ambition, okays his new idea – to strip the phones’ re-usable parts. However, he offers no financial help or guarantees from SNE, and will only buy the results if they pass an official quality check. Jing Hao reckons that, if the re-usable parts are 85% or above, his pan will be viable and he can earn some RMB800,000 in four months. His only problem is to find a workshop and some workers. His maternal uncle, Liang Yongcheng (Tian Yu), who works as a nurse in an old people’s home, agrees to help him. Jing Hao sells everything he owns, rents a workshop, and moves the mountain of boxes there. He gathers together an oddball team of workers, including a onetime martial-arts champion (Gong Lei) and some volunteers from the old people’s home. He himself returns to doing high-rise window-cleaning during the day to earn some money to pay the bills, but the whole project is still touch-and-go, with continuous setbacks.
REVIEW
As a young, never-say-die entrepreneur trying to make money for his sister’s operation, Mainland actor-singer Yi Yangqianxi 易烊千玺, 21, gives his best performance in a lead role since his first in youth drama Better Days 少年的你 (2019). The main difference between Nice View 奇迹 笨小孩 and Days is that here he’s called upon to carry the film – with no co-lead, just a strong array of character actors. And given that it’s a feel-good Chinese New Year movie, he also manages to keep things light without losing any of the essential drama. This second feature by writer-director Wen Muye 文牧野, 37, doesn’t quite have the dramatic heft of his powerful black comedy Dying to Survive 我不是药神 (2018) but is still an engaging ride. Box office was a very nice RMB1.38 billion, placing it third among the five live-action CNY attractions, behind The Battle at Lake Changjin II 长津湖之水门桥 (RMB4.06 billion) and comedy Too Cool to Kill 这个杀手不太冷静 (RMB2.62 billion).
A former child actor, Hunan-born Yi is best known as a member of the massively successful boyband TFBoys and his popularity with young viewers has rapidly become a guarantee of strong business. The surprise has been that he’s shown considerable range in his four major film roles to date – from a teenage toughie in Better Days, through a self-centred millennial in A Little Red Flower 送你一朵小红花 (2020), to an initially annoying but finally acceptable young volunteer in The Battle at Lake Changjin 长津湖 (2021). In Nice View he dials down the self-entitlement to play a motivated but very average 20-year-old who’s moved to Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong, with his six-year-old sister after the death of their mother and then finds his sibling needs a heart operation within the next 18 months. Thanks to a tip-off from a hometown friend, Yi’s character ends up closing his small mobile-phone repair shop and gambling everything on a major throw of the dice.
Though the basic plot and the character’s motivation are standard devices, Wen and his four co-writers don’t spend much time focussing on the baby sister’s problems. This is a film about entrepreneurship, not a family tear-jerker, and the script hews hard to the ups-and-downs of Our Young Hero’s attempts to get a business going. Set in 2013, Nice View is another movie stressing the importance of southern China in the country’s economic and technological development: The Photographer 照相师 (2018) celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Mainland’s economic reform via a Shenzhen family story from 1977-2018, while Nice View is set just after Xi Jinping’s ascent to paramount leader in 2012 and his significant trip south to Guangdong province that deliberately paralleled Deng Xiaoping’s trip south in 1992. None of this, however, is necessary to know to enjoy the film, and it’s never put in the foreground. For Wen & Co. the only message is “as long as you work hard, there’s nothing you can’t achieve” – a wet dream for Mainland millennial audiences and a basic tenet of the China Dream.
It’s also significant that Our Young Hero’s dream is achieved by communal effort, not just by his own. In the absence of many family members or any love story, his small band of workers function as a de facto family, ranging from spirited oldies, to a deaf woman, and a onetime martial-arts contender. Their oddball appeal underpins the film’s second half, and is underlined by a wedding celebration that gives the film a touchy-feely warmth. Though it’s never really in doubt whether the main character will succeed, Wen & Co. (as well as Yi’s gutsy performance) manage to keep the pot bubbling.
As well as the big setpiece of the wedding feast halfway through, attention is maintained with generic sequences now and then: Our Young Hero’s dash through the streets to catch a train, a fight vs. some thugs, and a car chase after some thieves. But the film is principally driven by its rich array of supporting characters, which is fully up the level of that in Dying to Survive if fractionally less well integrated. Though the relationship between Yi’s character and his uncle is involvingly played (especially by Tian Yu 天雨 as the latter), and other supports like Zhang Yu 章宇 as a crusty window-cleaner and Zhang Zhijian 张志坚 as a tough but perceptive company president are all memorable, some other characters float in and out to little effect. Veteran director Tian Zhuangzhuang 田壮壮 as a primary-school gatekeeper and Qi Xi 齐溪 as a partially deaf woman are among those who make little impression. Well-known comic/film-maker Xu Zheng 徐峰 (who played the lead in Dying) has an almost invisible cameo in the wedding feast.
All of this helps to slacken the pacing in the film’s second half, which could be tightened by around 10 minutes without losing anything. Despite that, the final 20 minutes turn into an overt heartwarmer (underlined by the supportive music of Huang Chao 黄超) that is both effective and as inspiring as it is meant to be. Huang is just one of several technicians, including d.p. Wang Boxue 王博学 and art director Li Miao 李淼, who also worked on Dying, and all assure a technically smooth product that’s rarely showy for its own sake. The whole shebang is again creatively produced by the experienced Ning Hao 宁浩,of whose Dirty Monkeys production house Wen is a member. The film’s lame English title is never explained; the Chinese one literally means “(A) Miracle: Stupid Kid”. Stupid Kid 笨小孩 is a well-known 1998 song by Liu Dehua 刘德华 [Andy Lau] that praises success through perseverance, not necessarily through talent.
CREDITS
Presented by Shanghai Dirty Monkeys Studio (CN), General Dream Studio (Shanghai) (CN), Shenzhen Media Group (CN), China Film (CN), Alibaba Pictures (Beijing) (CN), Wanda Pictures (CN), Beijing Super Lion Culture Communication (CN), MaxTimes Pictures (Hubei) (CN). Produced by General Dream Studio (Shanghai), Horgos Jindouyun Film & TV Culture Communication (CN).
Script: Zhou Chucen, Xiu Mengdi, Wen Muye, Han Xiaohan, Zhong Wei. Photography: Wang Boxue. Editing: Liu Jinghao, Liu Heng, Wang Nan. Music: Huang Chao. Songs: Huang Chao. Art direction: Li Miao. Styling: Li Miao. Costumes: Zhang Qianru. Sound: Zhou Yi, Lin Siyu, Wang Zhouyuan. Action: Song Zongguo. Visual effects: Jiang Chao, Huang Canzhou. B-unit direction: Han Xiaohan. Executive direction: Ma Liang, Qu Chaoya, Huang Jianyun.
Cast: Yi Yangqianxi (Jing Hao), Tian Yu (Liang Yongcheng), Chen Halin (Jing Tong), Qi Xi (Wang Chunmei), Gong Lei (Zhang Longhao), Xu Juncong (Zhang Chao), Wang Ning (Liu Hengzhi), Huang Yao (Wu Xiaoli), Gong Jinguo (Zhong Wei), Tian Zhuangzhuang (Sun, primary-school gatekeeper), Wang Chuanjun (Li Ping, SNE manager), Xu Zheng (cook at wedding), Zhang Yu (Ma Yue, window-cleaners’ boss), Zhang Zhijian (Zhao Zhenchang, SNE president), Yong Mei (Ma Yuxia), Yang Xinming (heart specialist), Zhu Junlin (Tao Zhiyong), Jia Hongxiao (policeman in office), Sun Zhengyu (Li Bin), Han Xiao (moneylender), Wang Lihan (Liang Yongcheng’s wife), Yue Xiaojun (Yang), Chen Yitong (Jing Tong, aged 14).
Release: China, 1 Feb 2022.