One Night Surprise

一夜惊喜

China/Hong Kong, 2013, colour, 2.35:1, 106 mins.

Director: Jin Yimeng 金依萌 [Eva Jin].

Rating: 8/10.

A re-invented Fan Bingbing bounces back bigtime in this beautifully tooled, girly rom-com.

STORY

China, the present day. Mixue (Fan Bingbing), 32, has been an over-achiever all her life, and has been working for five years at a foreign-owned advertising agency. Now in charge of her own team, she has her eyes set on the job of Creative Director. The one thing she still lacks in her career plan is a husband and family. The agency is owned by Harvard-trained, Chinese-American businessman Zhou Bi’an (Daniel Henney), 38, and his wife Li Maiqi (Jin Yimeng), who are going through a messy divorce. Mixue zeroes in on Zhou Bi’an as a potential future husband, ignoring the tender advances of one of her own staff, Hong Konger Zhang Tongyu (Li Zhiting), who is both too young and not successful enough for her. One day, Mixue suddenly learns she’s a month pregnant and realises she must have had sex at her splashy birthday party, at which she got drunk and passed out. Champion ice-skater Lin Zhibo (Jiang Jinfu), son of her best friend Lin Weiwei (Wu Peici), says he simply carried her up to her hotel room. Seafood sauce businessman Lu Dahu (Li Ming), a persistent suitor, says he only visited her room and turned her safely over in her bed. Zhou Bi’an, who also passed out at the party and was in the next hotel room, remembers having had sex with someone; at Mixue’s insistence that it was her, he says he’s prepared to do his duty if she keeps the matter quiet until after his divorce. Meanwhile, Zhang Tongyu is still trying to show Mixue he’s a “reliable” man for her, and offers to help her through her pregnancy, no strings attached.

REVIEW

Mainland actress Fan Bingbing drops her diva pose, rolls up her sleeves and reveals herself as a fine physical comedienne in One Night Surprise 一夜惊喜, a beautifully tooled rom-com with a girly, manga flavour about a 30-something career woman who suddenly finds she’s pregnant from a drunken one-night stand she can’t remember. Fan’s career has been all over the place recently, with roles in foreign productions (Stretch, 2011; My Way 마이  웨이, 2011) and multiple cameos in local ones, but only one leading role in the past couple of years – in the risible psychodrama Double Xposure 二次曝光 (2012). A year after that debacle, she’s reinvented herself yet again and bouncd back in Surprise, which cleverly allows her to riff on her own image, start settling into 30-something roles, and also let down her hair and reveal some real personality beneath the various masks.

One has to go a long way back in Fan’s career to find a comparably natural and fresh performance – in fact, right back to her big-screen debut in Valentine’s Day movie Love at First Sight 一见钟情 (2002, aka Fall in Love), a fascinating early example of the then-nascent rom-com genre. In Surprise, of course, she’s a fully-developed screen icon in a now fully-developed genre, and working again with a writer-director, Jin Yimeng 金依萌 [Eva Jin], who has a background in manga, a strong sense of colour and visual design, and also China’s self-styled “first chickflick” (Sophie’s Revenge 非常完美, 2009) under her belt. In that film, interestingly, Fan also parodied her diva status by playing a well-known actress, but seemed to have had her part trimmed to give more prominence to lead actress/co-producer Zhang Ziyi 章子怡 in the klutzy lead role. Four years later, director Jin now gives Fan centre stage in an equally klutzy part that she handles way less mechanically than Zhang – who’s since made her own kind-of-prequel to Sophie, called My Lucky Star 非常幸运 (2013), directed by US TV director Dennie Gordon.

In the meantime, Jin herself has also honed her writing and directing skills. Surprise contains no surprises in the office rom-com department, stuffed with the usual archetypes (handsome boss, ditzy secretary, sensitive young suitor, female bosom friend, office gay etc.) and drips with the usual aspirational lifestyle of most China rom-coms. But Jin has constructed a script that ticks like a Swiss clock, full of physical comedy and sexual innuendo in the first half, scaling that back from the midpoint to let the three main characters develop, followed by a fairytale coda in a suitably exotic location. It’s all utterly generic, but thanks to the tight pacing and acting ensemble it works.

Typically for Jin, who was born in northeast China but studied film-making in the US, the crew has a very international feel. The design (by Taiwan’s Peng Weimin 彭维民, Love on Credit 幸福额度, 2011, and Hong Kong’s Li Deya 李德雅) has a cartoony feel, with strong, pop colours; and photography, editing and music by Americans Michael Bonvillain (Cloverfield, 2008; Zombieland, 2009; Wanderlust, 2012), John L. Roberts (TV’s Glee, 2009-  ) and Joey Newman (also TV) combine into a very smooth technical package. Though the movie is full of visual effects for the fears and daydreams of Fan’s character, and has a fulsome look, overall it feels much more grounded and Mainland than the super-glossy, South Korean-style Sophie.

Fan throws herself into the main role and is matched in the physical comedy stakes with a very relaxed performance by Korean American Daniel Henney (Shanghai Calling 纽约客@上海, 2012), as her can-do Chinese-American boss. (The fact that Henney speaks to her mostly in English and she to him mostly in Mandarin doesn’t seem a problem at all, thanks to their distracting chemistry and the goofy humour.) As her goody-goody admirer, Hong Kong actor-singer Li Zhiting 李治廷 [Aarif Lee] (Echoes of the Rainbow 岁月神偷, 2009; Bruce Lee My Brother 李小龙, 2010) makes less of a forceful impression, though his sappy role does gain some emotional heft in the second half.

Other roles are peppered with well-known names, all on good form: Taiwan’s Wu Peici 吴佩慈 as the best female friend, Mainland comic Xu Zheng 徐峥 (Lost in Thailand 人再囧途之泰囧, 2012) as a camp gynaecologist, Hong Kong’s Li Ming 黎明 [Leon Lai] uncharacteristically going way over the top as a gross suitor, and Jin herself cameoing as the boss’ bitchy wife. The best single speech, however, goes to actress Ni Hongjie 倪虹洁 (the tomboy police constable in comedy My Own Swordsman 武林外传, 2011) as the ditzy secretary who holds an especially strong torch for her boss.

The finale, set in Penang, seems to be some sort of in-joke (or dues-paying) to Li Zhiting’s part-Malaysian background. The film’s Chinese title, as well as roughly meaning the English one, also incorporates the name of Fan’s unborn daughter. At an early stage, one English title of the movie was F*** I’m Pregnant.

CREDITS

Presented by Draw & Shoot Films (CN), Media Asia Film Production (HK), Cathay Global Media (CN). Produced by Draw & Shoot Films (CN).

Script: Jin Yimeng [Eva Jin]. Photography: Michael Bonvillain. Editing: John L. Roberts. Music: Joey Newman. Production design: Peng Weimin, Xue Yubin. Art direction: Li Deya. Costume design: Li Hui. Sound: Zhu Yanfeng. Action: Nie Jun. Visual effects: Wang Xiaobo, Li Jiyang (Pixomondo, Young Art Pioneer).

Cast: Fan Bingbing (Mixue/Michelle), Li Zhiting [Aarif Lee] (Zhang Tongyu/Tony), Daniel Henney (Zhou Bi’an/Bill), Wu Peici (Lin Weiwei/Vivian), Jiang Jinfu (Lin Zhibo/Bobo/Jeb, Lin Weiwei’s son), Ni Hongjie (Zhang Haidi/Heidi), Liu Yanchen (Jiji/Gigi), Li Ming [Leon Lai] (Lu Dahu/Xuexue/Shelly), Xu Zheng (He Fengfeng/Philip, male gynaecologist), Jin Yimeng [Eva Jin] (Li Maiqi/Maggie, Zhou Bi’an’s wife), Yang Qing (female gynaecologist), Huang Yifei (sports trainer), Zhao Ming (Ma Lili/Lily), Zhang Xinying (Gao Meimei/Mimi, Zhibo’s girlfriend), Peng Yang (gymnast).

Release: China, 9 Aug 2013; Hong Kong, 12 Sep 2013.

(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 23 Sep 2013.)