Being Human
做人
Singapore, 2010, colour, 1.85:1, 107 mins.
Director: Liang Zhiqiang 梁智强 [Jack Neo].
Rating: 7/10.
Well-paced comedy about shady business practices finds the right balance in all departments.
STORY
Singapore, the present day. Mai Wei (Li Guohuang), a successful branch manager for slimming company Natural Beauty, is sacked for cutting corners in the name of profit and attracting the ire of customers. Enraged, he sets up a rival company, My Way Slimming Centre, with several Natural Beauty employees, including Jie (Tian Mingyao), younger brother of his wife Zu Er (Yang Yanyan). As Natural Beauty continues to expand, Mai Wei goes on the offensive, licensing a herbal slimming pill, Dadavianxiaovoo, that contains a banned substance. As his company’s image representative he chooses the massively overweight Wang Yaoyao (Zheng Yingying), daughter of his favourite huntun noodle stall owner (Wang Lei), and feeds her the pills in large doses. Meanwhile, Zu Er, who’s desperate to have a child after eight years of marriage, starts believing the gods have cursed them because of her husband’s unscrupulous business practices.
REVIEW
It will always be a massive irony in the career of Singaporean satirist Liang Zhiqiang 梁智强 [Jack Neo] that, when he finally got the balance pretty much right in Being Human 做人, he suffered the biggest personal setback of his career in the simultaneous revelation of his two-year extra-marital affaire with model-actress Zhong Jiayan 钟佳燕 (who even has a small role in the movie). This shouldn’t be allowed to detract in any way from the merits of the picture – though for many conservative Singaporeans it did – but for a filmmaker whose audience is mostly local (or at least limited to Southeast Asia) the two will always, unfortunately, be related.
Being Human is Liang’s usual mixture of social satire, low jokes, media parodies, anti-government jabs and common-man grandstanding. But even his hardest-to-accept tendencies – lecturing to his audience while also sending up Singapore’s nanny statism, and a tendency to slip into pure melodrama in his finales – are properly seasoned here with plenty of comedy and irony. The movie’s two false endings – which will be missed by audiences who exit before the end titles – cleverly undercut some of the moralising and find a convenient way of showing crime must not be seen to pay.
Though one misses the absence of regulars like Cheng Xuhui 程旭辉 [Henry Thia] and Mo Xiaoling 莫小玲 [Patricia Mok] (not to mention Liang himself, here just in a cameo as a waiter), the movie benefits hugely from the performance of another regular, Li Guohuang 李国煌 [Mark Lee]. Left to himself to carry the picture, Li, who’s made a career out of playing fast-talking, shady types, is superb as unscrupulous slimming-centre boss Mai Wei who’ll do anything to get back at the company that sacked him, and the script by Liang’s new writing colleague He Qi’an 何启安 (who came on board for his previous film, horror anthology Where Got Ghost? 吓到笑, 2009) provides him with some wonderful rapidfire prattle.
With most of the dialect quota – under the Singapore government’s 60/40 Mandarin/dialect regulation [as of 2010] – going to the stall owner played by Wang Lei 王雷, Li’s dialogue is, alas, largely in Mandarin rather than the more natural-sounding and humorous Hokkien in which this actor always blooms. But Li compensates with an energised performance that’s beautifully partnered by Chinese Malaysian theatre actress Yang Yanyan 杨雁雁 [Yeo Yann Yann] (from Liang’s Love Matters 幸福万岁, 2009) as his desperate-to-conceive wife. In the main supporting roles, Taiwan TV host NoNo (aka Chen Xuanyu 陈宣裕), as Mai’s “conscience”, and local TV host Tian Mingyao 田铭耀, as his young sidekick, are okay.
If the dialogue is close to Liang’s That One No Enough 那个不够 (1999) in smartly paced humour, on a technical level the film is up there with his better comedies like I Not Stupid Too 小孩不笨2 (2006) and Just Follow Law 我在政府部门的日子 (2007). Both of those escaped having a TV look by being shot by Hong Kong d.p. Lin Guohua 林国华 [Ardy Lam]; in Being Human, Zeng Qingming 曾庆明, who did the best looking of all of Liang’s movies (Homerun 跑吧孩子, 2003), gives the film a proper cinematic composition. Despite all these merits, it’s still an intensely Singaporean film that has little market offshore, but after 10 years at the directing wheel Liang seems to have found his own balance.
CREDITS
Presented by J Team Productions (SG). Produced by J Team Productions (SG).
Script: Liang Zhiqiang [Jack Neo], He Qi’an. Original story: Liang Zhiqiang [Jack Neo], He Qi’an, Wu Peishuang [Boris Boo]. Photography: Zeng Qingming. Editing: Yan Wenzhong. Music: Mo Ruli. Art direction: Chu Liqi. Costume design: Lan Huishan. Sound: Mo Ruli. Visual effects: Sixtrees Viz Comms, Iceberg Design.
Cast: Li Guohuang [Mark Lee] (Mai Wei/Max), Yeo Yann Yann (Zu Er/Zoe, Mai Wei’s wife), NoNo [Chen Xuanyu] (Mai Wei’s conscience), Zheng Yingying (Wang Yaoyao), Wang Lei (Wang Yaoyao’s father), Tian Mingyao (Jie/Jack, Zu Er’s younger brother), Huang Hui (_Natural Beauty_ boss), Huang Tongyao (her associate), Zhong Jiayan (Mrs. Li, Jie’s wife), Chen Meixin (slim Wang Yaoyao), Xie Ji [Abigail Chay] (Dadavianxiaovoo saleswoman), Liang Zhiqiang [Jack Neo] (waiter).
Release: Singapore, 4 Mar 2010.
(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 4 Jul 2010.)