Because of Love

无疯也起浪

China, 2020, colour, 2.35:1, 88 mins.

Director: Li Zhi 李智.

Rating: 4/10.

Wannabe satirical comedy, à la  Ma Hua FunAge, is clumsily structured and has no sense of overall tone.

STORY

Haidao city, T country, Southeast Asia, the present day. Two friends, Lao Hei (Wang Chengsi) and Daliang (Tao Liang), nervously prepare to jump off the roof of a building onto an air bag. Many years later, members of the T country government await the arrival at a meeting of Jingjing (Huang Jing), the owner of Compassion Courtyard, a privately-run clinic in the Chinese quarter of Haidao city that’s about to be officially recognised as a Convalescence Centre for Southeast Asian Chinese. Jingjing arrives very late and immediately starts rowing with the centre’s current manager, Xiaoliang (Du Chen), demanding to know when he’s resigning and coming back to China. The meeting is postponed and afterwards, strolling on the beach with Xi’na (Kong Lingling), a Chinese-speaking ministerial aide, Xiaoliang explains the whole backstory of Jingjing and the clinic. (Daliang was a wannabe singer in China who bummed around with his entrepreneurial pal Lao Hei. At a class reunion he heard that a fellow student, Feng Xiaolang [Feng Qinchuan], whom he’d always fancied, was RMB2 million in debt due to a business concern overseas. Though penniless, he decided to help her, and another fellow student, Xiaobi [Liu Guanghui], promised that, for an upfront payment of RMB1 million, he could arrange for Daliang to win a singing competition worth RMB3 million in prize money. Daliang borrowed RMB1 million but later found Xiaobi had cheated him. Daliang and Lao Hei had eventually ended up in debt for RMB1 million to Hong Kong gangster Wang, who ordered them to fly to Haidao and discredit Compassion Courtyard, which was in the way of an expensive redevelopment scheme he had for the city’s Chinese quarter. To get into the heavily-guarded clinic, Daliang and Lao Hei pretended to be mad by jumping off a building. Inside, all the patients appeared to be lunatics, and the various attempts by Daliang and Lao Hei to discredit the clinic all ended in failure.) Xiaoliang pauses in his telling of the story to Xi’na. (To his delight, Daliang found that the head of Compassion Courtyard was Feng Xiaolang, whom he’d originally fallen for at high school. He told Lao Hei he couldn’t go through with the plan to bankrupt the clinic, however much it might endanger them with Wang. But Feng Xiaolang turned out to know more about everything than she appeared.)

REVIEW

An attempt at satirical comedy in the style of Beijing troupe Ma Hua FunAge 开心麻花 bellyflops spectacularly in Because of Love 无疯也起浪, largely due to a poorly constructed script and a lack of any overall tone. The third feature of Anhui-born writer-director Li Zhi 李智, 42, who trained as a d.p. and went on to direct the character comedy Pirated Love 盗版爱情 (2009) and martial-arts fantasy Sword of Hope 轩辕剑传奇 (2015), it casts three Ma Hua players in the leads but has no idea what to do with them. Part knockabout comedy, part wannabe satire, part patriotic exhortation, it was originally due out in late Feb but was postponed due to the Covid lockdown. It finally opened, billing itself as “the first comedy after the epidemic”, with little targeted publicity in late Aug, when The Eight Hundred was slaying all box-office opposition. The mirthless mash crashed with a tiny RMB1.5 million.

Li showed with Pirated Love that he could write and direct lively character comedy – especially with a veteran comic like Liu Hua 刘桦 in the cast – and the purely knockabout stuff in Because of Love just about passes muster, with okay chemistry between actors Wang Chengsi 王成思 and Tao Liang 陶亮 as two typical Ma Hua-like losers. But Li just can’t get the film to the next (satirical) level that he’s clearly aiming for, despite the casting of both Wang (the long-haired martial artist in Ma Hua movie Never Say Die 羞羞的铁拳, 2017) and Tao (the “land-swimming” inventor in Ma Hua’s Hello Mr. Billionaire 西虹市首富, 2018). As the more “entrepreneurial” of the two pals who end up in hock to a Hong Kong gangster, Wang is fine at broad comedy; the quieter Tao, clearly cast in the role usually taken by Ma Hua star Shen Teng 沈腾, is okay but doesn’t hold the screen enough. In her first leading film role, Ma Hua stage actress Feng Qinchuan 冯秦川 lacks the satirical heft of a star like Ma Li 马丽 and doesn’t even appear in the film until halfway through. Apart from some funny high-school flashbacks with Tao, she’s largely stuck in a reactive role by Li’s writing.

The script’s awkward structure works against the film, with a laborious set-up that lasts half-an-hour, followed by the actual plot (set in an overseas loonybin) that lasts a further half-hour, capped by a mushy wrap-up that explains everything and ends with a patriotic exhortation that all Chinese should care one another, especially when abroad. Most of the film is a flashback, and some of that a flashback-within-a-flashback, further hobbling an already clumsy plot that takes awhile to explain itself. The main story – set in a mental asylum for Chinese in Thailand, whose inmates aren’t half as mad as they seem – is a typical Ma Hua satirical device that Li’s script can’t really develop into a central idea, resulting in the surrounding hour being filled up with every kind of idiot comedy and narrative twists to keep things going.

Technical credits are okay, led by attractive widescreen photography by Zhao Xin 赵昕 (black comedy The Suspicious 最佳嫌疑人, 2014) and Sun Wei 孙伟. Locations around Qingdao double for the fictional “T country” (clearly identified as Thailand). The film’s Chinese title is a pun on the proverb 无风不起浪 (“Without wind there are no waves”), with the negative particle removed and the character for “wind” 风 replaced with a homonym meaning “craziness” 疯. So a rough English translation would be “Without Craziness There Are Still Waves”. In a further pun, the heroine’s given name, Xiaolang 小浪, also means “Little Wave”.

CREDITS

Presented by Lizhi Pictures (Beijing) (CN), Qingdao Hongfan Film & TV Communication (CN).

Script: Li Zhi. Script associate: Shao Qingquan. Photography: Zhao Xin, Sun Wei. Editing: Gu Jianhua. Music: Dong Lei. Art direction: Jin Yang, Li Shu. Costumes: Zhang Jun. Sound: Song Qilin, Zhang Jiantao, Huang Xiaopeng. Visual effects: Zhang Gang, Tian Huayuan. Executive direction: Zhang Shuaishuai.

Cast: Wang Chengsi (Lao Hei), Tao Liang (Daliang), Feng Qinchuan (Feng Xiaolang), Du Xiaoyu (Wang, Hong Kong gang boss), Kong Lingling (Xi’na), Huang Jing (Jingjing), Du Chen (Xiaoliang), Zhang Mei’e (Wang, old granny), Chai Lu (Fang Qian), Wang Xudong (Fang Hou), Zhao Jielin (Wang Xiaohong, webgirl), Shao Laowu (Xiaogua), Li Jinze (Xiaolaoda), Liu Guanghui (Xiaobi), Wang Jingting (Bobo), Ma Wenbo (Zhang, manager), Zhang Shuaishuai (bald thug), Chen Xingyu (baldie).

Release: China, 28 Aug 2020.