Upstream

逆行人生

China, 2024, colour, 2.35:1, 120 mins.

Director: Xu Zheng 徐峥.

Rating: 6/10.

A black but ultimately warm comedy, set among Shanghai’s community of food deliverers, shows comedian Xu Zheng developing as a director.

STORY

Shanghai, 2023. After years of working round the clock – and contracting diabetes as a result – to become a group leader at an IT company, software engineer Gao Zhilei (Xu Zheng), 45, is suddenly made redundant one day as part of staff cuts. Offered RMB300,000 redundancy (about half of what he’s due), he storms out, threatening to sue the company. One month later he still can’t find a job because of his age. Though Gao Zhilei still pretends to go to work, his father (Ding Yongdai), who runs a small shop below the family’s flat, realises he’s jobless and scolds him, as the main breadwinner, for acting irresponsibly towards his wife Xiao Ni (Xin Zhilei) and young daughter Jiajia (Chen Halin). Another month later a friend whom Gao Zhilei has paid to find him a job as a technical director – average monthly salary, RMB40,000-50,000 – still hasn’t found him anything, and then cheats Gao Zhilei out of the RMB30,000 he was given. Gao Zhilei’s father has a heart attack, and then a heart operation costing RMB240,000, of which he pays RMB100,000 in advance. Gao Zhilei finally admits the truth to Xiao Ni, who’s angry but practical: she works out that, to cover minimum costs, they need about RMB22,000 a month, of which she can bring in RMB7,000 by giving drumming tuition and he will need to find RMB15,000. By chance, Gao Zhilei hears that food deliverers can make that amount, and he ends up joining a company, the yellow-helmeted Foodie Delivery 吃货外卖, where the tough station manager (Jia Bing) puts him under the wing of experienced young deliverer Yang Dashan (Wu Jiakai). The company’s main competitor is the blue-helmeted Rapideliver 送得快, and the job is highly pressurised, with every second counting and deductions made for late deliveries. Gao Zhilei discovers a whole separate world of people brought together from all walks of life and from all over the country. On his first day Gao Zhilei makes all minds of mistakes and ends up with negative earnings; after a months he’s earned only RMB4,000, minus the cost of uniform, delivery box and scooter rent which totals RMB800. Lowest-ranked among all the station’s deliverers, and desperate to keep the job, Gao Zhilei throws himself on the mercy of the top-ranked deliverer, Da Hei (Feng Bing), a grumpy, highly-focused loner from Inner Mongolia province who knows all the tricks of the trade. Gao Zhilei starts to improve his ranking, but then Da Hei has a breakdown and goes on sick leave. And Gao Zhilei also makes a discovery about Xiao Ni.

REVIEW

Popular bald comedian Xu Zheng 徐峥, 52, takes a small step in broadening his footprint as a director with Upstream 逆行人生, a black comedy set in the world of his native city’s bike deliverers that always has a very grounded, human feel despite moments of oafish comedy. The film swings, as usual for Xu, between good old-fashioned belly laughs and his brand of nostalgic romanticism. But it has a different feel from the three previous features which he directed and starred in – the odd-couple road comedies Lost in Thailand 人再囧途之泰囧 (2012), Lost in Hong Kong 港囧 (2015) and Lost in Russia 囧妈 (2020), of which the first two took well over RMB1 billion each, mega-hits in their time. (Xu released Russia for free online, during the coronavirus lockdown.) For a start there’s a more homogenous feel to the picture, being almost entirely set in the self-contained world of food deliverers; but also the film relies purely on character development rather than foreign locales to drive it forward. Summer box office was a solid but unspectacular RMB359 million. Two months later it was released on the Youku online platform.

Rather than looking at the Lost films for clues to the evolution of Xu’s film-making – especially with regard to Upstream – it’s better to study the episodes he contributed to the portmanteau films My People, My Country 我和我的祖国 (2019), My People My Homeland 我和我的家乡 (2020) and My Country, My Parents 我和我的父辈 (2021), in each of which his contribution was among the strongest. All three have a warm nostalgia for the past – Shanghai backstreet life in the mid-1980s, rural schooling in the early 1990s, and Shanghai in the late 1970s – and rely much more on character than on physical comedy. The only other work Xu has directed in the meantime is the 23-minute, online comedy 伊定有戏 (2021, literally “Everything Will Turn Out Okay”, see left), a collection of three shorts (sponsored by various dairy-product companies) that look at the same events in an apartment block one Autumn Festival evening from various characters’ viewpoints. Like Upstream, and Xu’s comedy in general, it’s centred on the small aggravations of life, mostly caused by thoughtless or selfish people. Xu himself plays a father who’s desperately trying to teach his young son mathematics amid various distractions.

In its first half Upstream paints a scary portrait of modern-day, metropolitan China – rude people, non-stop pressure to succeed, the ever-present tyranny of mobile phones, and employment hard to find. In a pre-title set-up, Gao Zhilei (Xu, with a full head of hair this time) is a software engineer who’s worked round-the-clock (and contracted diabetes as a result) to become a group leader. One day he’s suddenly made redundant and forced to accept a humiliating package; he storms out, smashing the place up on the way. Post-main title, he still can’t find a job after two months, a friend tries to cheat him out of a finder’s fee, and, as the family’s main breadwinner, he’s still pretending to go to work every day. Mirroring the film’s Chinese title (“Life against the Current”), he’s deemed too old, at 45, for the IT market. After belatedly breaking the news to his peeved but pragmatic wife, he then hears by chance that a job as a food deliverer could fit his financial needs.

It’s here, after a leisurely (but ultimately rewarding) set-up of some 20 minutes, that the movie really begins, as a young deliverer takes Gao Zhilei under his wing and convinces his hard-nosed station manager (comedian Jia Bing 贾冰, the annoying train conductor in Lost in Russia) to give Gao Zhilei a try-out. The middle-aged office worker discovers a whole new community, from all over the country and all walks of life, which tests him in a completely different way. Based on an online novel (and supposedly true events) by Qingming 清明, the screenplay by Xu and regular co-writer He Keke 何可可 (supported by a whole team of associates) comes up with plenty of rapid-fire, situational jokes as Gao Zhilei learns the job, with its perpetual pressure to deliver on time; as he gradually learns the tricks of the trade, his IT background then proves an advantage.

Around the hour mark the film suddenly turns serious with the health situation of Gao Zhilei’s father; later there’s a similar change when one deliverer has an accident. But the film’s overall emotional trajectory is towards a warm, communal feel – again, very typical of Xu’s movies – as people come together to help each other. Supporting performances are strong down the line, from the always reliable Jia as the phlegmatic manager and Xin Zhilei 辛芷蕾 (the super-swordswoman in Brotherhood of Blades II: The Infernal Battlefield 绣春刀II    修罗战场, 2017; female cyborg in Yes, I Do! 我的女友是机器人, 2020) as Our Hero’s pragmatic, drum-playing wife to Feng Bing 冯兵 as the eccentric biker from Inner Mongolia and Wang Xiao 王骁 as his only pal. The whole community of deliverers is warmly and convincingly drawn in some depth.

The widescreen photography by Zeng Jian 曾剑 (regular d.p. of director Li Yu 李玉) is typically realistic, showing Shanghai in all its variety in a very natural, backstreets way. Editor Tu Yiran 屠亦然 and composer Peng Fei 彭飞, both Xu regulars, provide good support as always, especially in the elaborate montage sequences of Gao Zhilei at work. Unfortunately the film as a whole is let down by its flashy VFX – notably in the film’s finale, and earlier in explaining the mechanics of the deliverers’ job – which are overdone and a distraction from the characters. It’s a common fault in Mainland movies nowadays, as is the over-long running time that could easily be shortened by 15-20 minutes. These weaknesses lose a potentially 7/10 film a whole point; but, at its best, Upstream is still well worth a look.

CREDITS

Presented by Shanghai Ruyi Film & TV Production (CN), Maxtimes (Hubei) (CN), Eighty-Eight Film (Shanghai) (CN), Sichuan Dao Pictures (CN), Hubei Yangtze River Film Group (CN), Beijing 88 Cultural Development (CN), Shanghai Taopiaopiao Movie & TV Culture (CN), China Film (CN), Tianjin Maoyan Weiying Cultural Media (CN). Produced by Maxtimes (Hubei) (CN).

Script: Zhonglele Studio (Qiu Zhiyu, Lu Meili, Hua Weilin, Hou Jing, Yang Huiqing, Huang Tao, Shi Lijia), He Keke, Xu Zheng. On-set script: Qiu Zhiyu. Online novel: Qingming. Photography: Zeng Jian. Editing: Xiao Yang (initial); Tu Yiran, Li Tianming (later). Editing advice: Zeng Jian. Music: Peng Fei. Art direction: Lu Wei. Costumes: Wang Mingming. Styling: Tang Ning. Sound: Shi Xiang, Yang Jiang, Zhao Nan. Car stunts: Du Zihao. Visual effects: Shi Ye (Image Architect VFX). Executive direction: Xi Jialin.

Cast: Xu Zheng (Gao Zhilei), Xin Zhilei (Xiao Ni, Gao Zhilei’s wife), Wang Xiao (Lao Kou/Stingy), Jia Bing (Zhu, delivery station manager), Feng Bing (Da Hei/Big Black), Ding Yongdai (Gao Zhilei’s father), Ding Jiali (Gao Zhilei’s mother), Chen Halin (Jiajia, Gao Zhilei’s daughter), Wu Jiakai (Yang Dashan, deliverer), Liu Meihan (Qiu Xiaomin, female deliverer), Yu Hewei (Wei, managing director), Huang Xiaolei (Tian Sanyuan, Lao Kou’s wife), Ma Dong (interviewer), Liang Jing (personnel manager), Wang Xiaoyu (Sun Yao, hippie-ish deliverer), Zhang Zhanyu (Zhang, deliverer), Chen Shan (Xiaohuang), He Nan (Lu Meili), Huang Xiaoning (Yangyang, Lao Kou’s sick daughter), Chen Zitao (Xiaowei, Lao Kou’s son), Chen Youlong (deaf-and-dumb deliverer), Tong Zhijian (philosophy professor), Zhou Yi’nan (Sun Fendou, Gao Zhilei’s office colleague), Liu Xuanrui (Xiaocui).

Release: China, 9 Aug 2024.