E.T. Made in China
我儿子去了外星球
China, 2018, colour/b&w, 2.35:1/4:3, 89 mins.
Director: Zhang Xiaosha 张小鲨.
Rating: 5/10.
Part-mockumentary about a villager and “aliens” is an over-egged but interesting calling-card.
STORY
Bocheng city, central China, Oct 2017. Chen Ligen (Zhen Jikang), a farmer in Lebo township claims to have had three encounters with aliens and found the body of one by the riverbank. Local television station BCTV sends Wang Xiaoru (Luo Siwei), a young reporter, to investigate. Chen Ligen’s engineer son Chen Xiaojun (Yu Fang) has gone missing and his wife Ma Xiaofeng (Bao Lei) has lost her mind. He himself has taken to wearing an “alien” spacesuit to publicise his battle against property developers who are pressuring him to move out so they can demolish his dilapidated Farm Fun 农家乐 hotel. He shows Wang Xiaoru the alien’s body, which he keeps in a coffin, and describes how a spaceship landed with three aliens, one of whom was electrocuted by a rabbit-catching net he’d laid down. He believes the other two aliens took his son, who supposedly died in a land slippage but whose body was never found. After BCTV’s director (Shao Mianwo) plays up the angle that the story is just a publicity stunt by Chen Ligen, Wang Xiaoru goes back with her cameraman Li (Li Zhi) to privately unearth the truth, using a broken camera that can only shoot in 4:3. Chen Ligen insists he won’t rest until the alien’s body is exchanged for his son. But then a scientific team from the National Astronomical Bureau suddenly arrives to investigate the alien’s body.
REVIEW
More full of ideas than is often good for it, but with a quiet technical assurance beneath its over-egged surface, E.T. Made in China 我儿子去了外星球 is a goofy part-mockumentary that makes young writer-director Zhang Xiaosha 张小鲨 (“Little Shark Zhang”, aka Zhang Junjie 张俊杰) a name to monitor. The film stirs in such weighty themes as superstition in an officially non-superstitious country, and the need for people to go with the flow in a fast-changing society, making the film more than just a playful black comedy about a villager who claims his son was abducted by aliens. The whole thing would undoubtedly be more successful as a leaner, 45-minute short but there’s no doubting the movie’s underlying intelligence.
The grandson of a shadowplay actor, Zhang draws on that influence in animated inserts, done in the style of traditional opera, that seek to “explain” the chaotic plot to the audience. That “chaos”, however, is deliberately self-generated – switching between different aspect ratios (widescreen to 4:3), the picture breaking up due to damage on the film’s hard disk, parts of the plot re-enacted by acting doubles, and so on. Some of these affectations become annoying after a while, partly because the basic storyline is not strong enough to support them (especially across 90 minutes) but also because the basic idea is quite cute and wouldn’t need to rely on such trickery if the script was more fully developed. E.T. Made in China is often at its best when it’s not fooling around too much with the technology or structure.
Zhang’s use of pop-culture references – the Taiwan song Story of a Small Town 小城故事, the Blue Danube waltz, the alien’s naff “body” – are witty enough, and the way in which the simple protagonist – a villager fighting for his existence – is woven into a larger story of property exploitation and financial scamming just about makes the film go the distance at feature length. Zhen Jikang 甄济康 is well cast as the plucky villager but it’s young actress-scriptwriter Luo Siwei 罗四维, 26, who’s worked mostly in TV drama, who quietly provides the heart of the film, as a TV reporter who doggedly uncovers the truth. The film appears to have been short around Wuhan, central China, on the banks of the Yangtze, and technical credits, including varied photography (docudrama to more standard stuff) by Xiong Wei 熊伟, are fine on a modest scale.
The Chinese title literally means “My Son Has Gone to an Alien Planet”.
CREDITS
Presented by Wuhan Chensheng Culture Communication (CN), Horgos Gongchang Damen Pictures (CN), Wuhan Daqixia Film (CN). Produced by Wuhan Daqixia Film (CN).
Script: Zhang Xiaosha. Photography: Xiong Wei. Editing: Chen Cheng, Xiong Wei. Music: Riccardo. Art direction: Yang Rui. Sound: Zhang Guodong. Action: Liu Jie. Executive direction: Zhi Huijie.
Cast: Zhen Jikang (Chen Ligen), Luo Siwei (Wang Xiaoru), Bao Lei (Ma Xiaofeng, Chen Ligen’s wife), Wang Wei (Wu), Gao Ping (village head), Qiu Wenyang (tramp actor), Zhou Qi (fake tramp), Li Zhi (Li, cameraman), Ma Haiyang, Zhao Pei (enforcers), Wang Shiqin (Chen Ligen actor), Xing Wei (Ma Xiaofeng actress), Dai Rebin (scientist), Xu Hejia (enforcer), Shao Mianwo (BCTV director), Pan Juju (old woman), Yu Fang (Chen Xiaojun, Chen Ligen’s son), Zhu Tao, Bie Lu (policemen), Zhang Shijie, Li Fan (nurses).
Premiere: Los Angeles Chinese Film Festival, 2 Nov 2018.
Release: China, 2 Dec 2018 (online).