The Movie Emperor

红毯先生

China/Hong Kong, 2023, colour, 1.78:1, 121 mins.

Director: Ning Hao 宁浩.

Rating: 4/10.

Promising satire on the film-star ego, and the industry in general, is undercut by cool, detached direction and performances, and a shapeless script.

STORY

Hong Kong, 2020. At the 39th Hong Kong Film Awards local superstar Liu Weichi (Liu Dehua) fails to win the Best Actor award and is embarrassed into accepting it on behalf of the winner, Chen Long [Jackie Chen], who hasn’t even bothered to turn up. Liu Weichi hides his humiliation but, while filming a video promo under director Summer (Rima Zeidan), discovers he’s also out of touch with the latest youth slang. In his private life he has just divorced the (secret) mother (Lin Xilei) of his two (secret) children in a settlement that gave her half his estate. To gain some credibility as an actor, Liu Weichi decides to accept a script from an arty Mainland director, Lin Hao (Ning Hao), that’s centred on a rural pig farmer. With his p.a. Lin Weiguo (Shan Liwen), he flies to China where he’s told that “padded-jacket” (mian’ao 棉袄) peasant films are liked by western film festivals and can win awards – though, to the director’s evident discomfort, Liu Weichi is more interested in making a serious film about paternal love. Liu Weichi approaches an executive, Zhuo (Wei Xiao), of an electric-vehicle company for finance, even though the latter has no interest or understanding of cinema. Initial shooting doesn’t go too well, so to make his performance more authentic Liu Weichi decides to “experience ordinary people’s life” by moving from his five-star hotel to a three-star one and drive his own car (even though he doesn’t know which side of the road to drive on in China). He eventually finds a real pig farmer (Xue Baohe) to help with his performance, though the reality hardly matches his ideas. He then decides that, for authenticity, he should do a horse stunt himself, with a real horse and without a professional double. The production company eventually sends clips of the movie to a European film festival head (Christoph Terhechte), who says he is interested. At a celebration party thrown by Zhuo, Liu Weichi and Summer flir with each other and later go back to her room. However, for various reasons nothing happens and Liu Weichi forgetfully leaves his wedding ring in her bathroom. Shooting is disrupted by the pig farmer wanting back a pig that Liu “adopted”. And a surprise visit by Liu Weichi’s ex-wife and kids ends in an argument when she sees he is no longer wearing his wedding ring. And then Liu Weichi is trolled online by animal activists who attack him for doing his own horse stunt.

REVIEW

Part film-industry satire, part star-ego takedown, The Movie Emperor 红毯先生 ends up as way less than the sum of its parts – a rather sad reflection on a bruised psyche that isn’t taken seriously even when it’s being sincere. Starring Hong Kong megastar Liu Dehua 刘德华 [Andy Lau] as a Hong Kong megastar who decides to make an arty peasant picture in the Mainland in order to nab a film festival award, the film unfortunately takes itself too seriously as well, with a very distanced, faux-arty style that goes against the underlying comic grain. Part-financed (and co-creatively produced 监制) by Liu himself via his Hong Kong company Infinitus, it was directed by Mainlander Ning Hao 宁浩, who has a checkered record with ironic comedy (good: Crazy Stone 疯狂的石头, 2006, Breakup Buddies 心花路放, 2014; not good: Crazy Alien 疯狂的外星人, 2019). Alas, life mirrored art: the film crashed at the box office, in one of the biggest disappointments of Liu’s and Ning’s careers. (In Ning’s case the bad news got even worse with his next film, The Hutong Cowboy 爆款好人, 2024, starring veteran Mainland comedian Ge You 葛优.)

World premiered at the Toronto festival in Sep 2023, and originally set to open in the Mainland on 17 Nov that year, The Movie Emperor was finally released on Chinese New Year’s Day, 10 Feb 2024. However, it was withdrawn after a week, having grossed only RMB80 million in the face of CNY blockbusters like YOLO 热辣滚烫 (RMB3.46 billion), Pegasus 2 飞驰人生2 and Article 20 第二十条. It was re-released a month later, on 15 Mar, but still flopped. The film’s total Mainland gross was a mere RMB94 million; its reported budget was RMB261 million.

The first 40 minutes hold plenty of promise, with the main theme laid out in the opening titles: overhead shots of red carpets being laid with great precision for an awards ceremony and a forklift suddenly entering the frame and dragging one of the carpets with it. The sarcastic humour continues during the actual ceremony – billed as the 39th Hong Kong Film Awards, an event which didn’t actually take place in the flesh because of Covid – during which local megastar Liu Weichi, aka Dany Lau (Liu), who’s in the running for the Best Actor award, is embarrassed into accepting it on behalf of the winner, a certain “Chen Long” 陈龙 [“Jackie Chen”], who hasn’t even bothered to show up. The awards sequence is peppered with real-life Hong Kong names like actors Liang Jiahui 梁家辉 [Tony Leung Ka-fai] and Yang Qianhua 杨千嬅 [Miriam Yeung] and director Wang Jing 王晶 [Wong Jing] appearing under similar pseudonyms.

Liu Weichi hides his damaged ego but is later made to feel increasingly out of touch with young people when shooting a short promo video. He decides to accept a script from arty Mainland director Lin Hao (Ning) about a rural pig farmer, hoping to restore his credibility as an actor. In China he’s told that this type of “padded jacket” (mian’ao 棉袄) film is liked by western festivals and can win prizes, though Liu Weichi is more interested in making a serious movie about paternal love. The director humours him, but Liu Weichi becomes more and more obsessed with experiencing “ordinary people’s life” to give an authentic performance.

During this opening section, there are plenty of acute jibes at the film industry and its denizens: Liu Weichi’s idea of experiencing real life is to move from a five-star hotel to a three-star one, and he seems even more out of touch when he approaches an electric-vehicle executive for finance of a film about peasant life. He’s also just divorced his (secret) wife, by whom he has two (secret) kids, but is more interested in stopping the news getting out and having his fanbase turned off than being a real father. All of this has an authentic but passé flavour: mian’ao movies actually went out of favour with western festivals some time ago, and Hong Kong stars rarely hide marriages any longer from their fans. If the whole film had been set 20-odd years ago, it would have had much more bite.

The script by Ning regulars including Liu Xiaodan 刘晓丹 and Wang Ang 王昂 starts to take on water after the 40-minute mark. Liu Weichi’s experiences of “real life” – especially with a real, salt-of-the-earth pig farmer – aren’t exactly comfortable. And in terms of plotting, the rest of the film hardly develops beyond this point. In the lack of any architecture to the screenplay, other ideas are thrown in to keep things running: a would-be dalliance with a video director (knowingly played by Lebanese-Taiwanese model/presenter Rima Zeidan 瑞玛席丹, 34, Missing Johnny 强尼•凯克, 2017), an online hoo-ha about Liu Weichi doing his own horse stunt without a professional double, the pig farmer wanting back the pig Liu Weichi “adopted”, and Liu Weichi’s missing wedding ring. This is all underscored by Liu Weichi’s growing paranoia about being secretly filmed, but in the shuffle the film’s basic theme of the actor’s bruised ego just sits there undeveloped.

Liu’s over-restrained performance and Ning’s cold, distanced direction don’t help. Photography by Wen Boxue (Blind Way 盲•道, 2017; Dying to Survive 我不是药神, 2018; Nice View 奇迹 笨小孩, 2022) is always neatly composed – and significantly not in widescreen – but has a remote, sanitised feel that may fit the megastar’s disjunct with reality but doesn’t draw the viewer in. The Liu Weichi role would have benefited from a more extrovert screen presence than Liu Dehua’s, though it seems that he and Ning deliberately avoided making a knockabout comedy. The use of a kind of rock version of Ravel’s Bolero to underscore Liu Weichi’s mounting paranoia is distracting.

Other performances are okay without being notable. Ning himself plays the arty Mainland director in a very restrained way, making little impression as a character. In her first movie in over a decade, Taiwan actress Lin Xilei 林熙蕾 [Kelly Lin] plays Liu Weichi’s ex-wife with a tart coolness more suitable for a marital drama. Only Hong Kong actor-musician Shan Liwen 单立文 (The Silent War 听风者, 2012), as Liu Weichi’s hopelessly pushy p.a., hits the right note of moderately exaggerated comedy that the film so badly lacks.

The film was shot during Feb-Apr 2022, in Shenzhen and Hainan island, with later reshoots in Shenzhen, Beijing and Hong Kong. The Chinese title means “Mr. Red Carpet”.

CREDITS

Presented by Shanghai Huanxi Media Group (CN), Huanxi Media Group (CN), Beijing Huanxi Media Group (CN), Dirty Monkeys (Shanghai) Culture & Media (CN), Beijing Huanshixi Media Group (CN), Huanhuanxixi (Tianjin) Media Group (CN), Taizhou Huanxi Media Group (CN), Hainan Sun Rise Film (CN), Infinitus Entertainment (HK), Shanghai Benxiaohai Media (CN), Horgos Bingyi Film & TV Culture Development (CN).

Script: Liu Xiaodan, Wang Ang, Yu Weiguo, Zhao Tianyou. Original story: Liu Xiaodan. Photography: Wang Boxue. Editing: Du Yuan. Music: Huang Yinghua [Raymond Wong Ying-wah], Huang Zhengzhong. Art direction: Xu Guiting, Zhang Xiaobing. Costumes: Wang Lin. Styling: Wei Xiangrong, Wang Lin. Sound: Zhang Jing, Wang Danrong. Action: Chen Zhongtai. Executive direction: Cai Jing.

Cast: Liu Dehua [Andy Lau] (Liu Weichi/Dany), Shan Liwen (Lin Weiguo), Rima Zeidan (Summer), Yu Weiguo (Yu), Ning Hao (Lin Hao), Lin Xilei [Kelly Lin] (Liu Weichi’s ex-wife), Liang Jiahui [Tony Leung Ka-fai] (Liang Jianhui, best actor nominee), Yang Qianhua [Miriam Yeung] (best actress winner), Wang Jing [Wong Jing] (Wang Jin, best actor award presenter), Zhang Zixian (village creditor, in film), Liu Yilin (QQ), Zhou Wei (Tiger), Sun Yang, Zhao Juncheng (best actor nominees), Zhang Xianjing (actress on red carpet), Chang Yuci (influencer on red carpet), Zhang Chi (male MC), Xie Feifei (female MC), Ma Dong (interviewer), Wei Xiao (Zhuo, electric-vehicle company executive), Zhang Wenbo (Wu), Song Xiao (Fei Miao/Fat Cat), Ni Kexin (Zhuo’s secretary), Wang Yilong (Ryan, Liu Weichi’s young son), Huang Shiting (Liu Weichi’s young daughter), Liu Xiaodan (scriptwriter), Xue Baohe (Hu Changjie, pig farmer), Li Shicheng (pig farmer’s son), Christoph Terhechte (European film festival head).

Premiere: Toronto Film Festival (Gala Presentations), 15 Sep 2023.

Release: China, 10 Feb 2024; Hong Kong, 29 Feb 2024.