Breakup Buddies
心花路放
China, 2014, colour, 2.35:1, 116 mins.
Director: Ning Hao 宁浩.
Rating: 7/10.
Buddy road comedy is director Ning Hao’s maturest film so far but very local in content.
STORY
Beijing, Sep 2012. Geng Hao (Huang Bo), a former singer who now runs a second-hand audio repairs shop, is served divorce papers by his wife, Kang Xiaoyu (Yuan Quan). Devastated, he first considers killing her new boyfriend (Li Chen) but instead goes on a bender, from which he’s rescued by his friend Hao Yi (Xu Zheng), a film producer. After taking Geng Hao to a hospital, Hao Yi suggests he accompanies him on a 3,000-kilometre car journey south, to Yunnan province; Hao Yi has to deliver some props to a film he’s producing there – a big-budget costume time-travel drama called Don’t Go, Xu Fu 徐福你别走 – but intends to use the journey as an excuse to pick up as many girls as possible. Ignoring all the missed calls from his ex-wife, Geng Hao finally agrees. (It was in Dali town, Yunnan province, that Geng Hao and Kang Xiaoyu first met in 2009, after she’d heard his song Go to Dali 去大理 and decided to fly there for a break after being depressed following her best friend’s wedding.) Geng Hao and Hao Yi reach Tianmen Mountain, in northwest Hunan province, central China, where Hao Yi has sex with a dancer, Dongdong (Tao Hui), who is in a promotional event for Avatar. (Kang Xiaoyu had stayed at the lakeside Indus Inn, and also looked after a wounded puppy she’s found in the street.) In Guizhou province, Hao Yi sets Geng Hao up with a young cosplaying internet friend, “Christina” (Zhou Dongyu), who works as a hairdresser; but things don’t work out between them, and then Dongdong suddenly turns up. The next morning, after a mammoth sex session with Dongdong, Hao Yi abandons her asleep in the hotel and escapes with Geng Hao. In the wilds of Sichuan, they have an argument and crash the car; they’re rescued by a beautiful woman, Siqing (Zhang Li), who agrees to give their car a tow. But Geng Hao decides he wants to return to Beijing to see Kang Xiaoyu, so Siqing and Geng Hao take him to the nearest airport. But when he calls Kang Xiaoyu on the phone, Geng Hao gets another surprise.
REVIEW
Following the tepid box office for his last feature, period heist movie Guns and Roses 黄金大劫案 (2012), director Ning Hao 宁浩 moves away from action and towards pure character comedy with Breakup Buddies 心花路放, which hitches a ride on the currently popular road-movie genre as well as re-teaming two of the country’s biggest comedy names, Xu Zheng 徐峥 and Huang Bo 黄渤, in the wake of the Xu-directed super-hit Lost in Thailand 人再囧途之泰囧 (2012). A relatively straightforward buddy movie, in which an emotionally scarred divorcee goes on a trip south with his womanising best friend, it has none of Thailand’s foreign locations or cartoony goofiness; but like this year’s cultier road movie The Continent 后会无期 (2014), it has a feel for the country’s restless Zeitgeist in its characters and their lack of direction, and communicates it in a much more populist, scatalogical way, without Continent‘s artier leanings. Though it doesn’t finally measure up to all of its ambitions, it’s still Ning’s most mature movie of his five commercial outings so far.
The film was pretty much a guaranteed hit from the off, but still suprised by becoming the fastest to join the elite RMB1 billion club, occupied [as of Nov 2014] by only three other local movies – Thailand, Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons 西游 降魔篇 (2013) by Stephen Chow, and VFX extravaganza The Monkey King 西游记之大闹天空 (2014). Outside China, most of the subtleties and local references in Buddies‘ dialogue won’t mean much – especially in the poor English subtitles, which over-amp the swearing and lose the gruff humour – but the main performances are still strong enough to make it an entertaining ride for audiences who have some familiarity with the cast.
As Hao Yi, the best friend who’s a womanising film producer, Xu most recognisably recycles his existing persona – a two-timing but likeable rogue with a soft heart beneath all the bravado. As his pal Geng Hao, Huang is less by the numbers: a Ning regular (Crazy Stone 疯狂的石头, 2006; Crazy Racer 疯狂的赛车, 2008; No Man’s Land 无人区, 2013), he follows his recent path of less goofy characters, here as a onetime singer who’s been devastated by his wife’s divorce and uses the journey to revisit the site of their first meeting in Dali, a popular tourist site in the southern province of Yunnan. It’s a much more low-key performance compared with Xu’s grandstanding one, as Geng Hao resists his friend’s attempts to get him laid en route and gradually learns to move on in life.
However, the most revelatory playing comes from the female cast, especially Zhou Dongyu 周冬雨 and Yuan Quan 袁泉. As a trashy, smalltown, cosplaying hairdresser, Zhou torpedoes her cute, elfin image (Under the Hawthorn Tree 山楂树之恋, 2010; The Palace 宫 锁沉香, 2013; My Old Classmate 同桌的妳, 2014) with utter conviction, while the older Yuan builds on her strong comeback in The Continent with a more extensive role as the ex-wife, showing a gift for wry comedy. In smaller parts, two actresses better known for TV drama are both memorable: Tao Hui 陶慧, 26, carves a surprisingly touching character as showgirl Dongdong, one of Hao Yi’s conquests who just won’t go away, and Zhang Li 张丽, 30, exudes class as a glamorous yuppie who comes to the men’s rescue on a deserted mountain road. Tao’s role, especially, is one that could have been expanded.
In its first half, Buddies gives the impression that it’s going to be about much more than just male carousing – specifically, issues like trust (which Geng Hao is short of, and Hao Yi abuses) and personal conviction (which Geng Hao is also short of, but Hao Yi seems to have buckets of). Even the two characters’ names – which sound similar, if pronounced with different tones, to desirable moral qualities – point in this direction, and a tension is set up between them as Geng Hao struggles to resist Hao Yi’s Mephistophelian games. But the script, lead written by Ning regulars Xing Aina 邢爱娜 (his wife) and Yue Xiaojun 岳小军, largely discards this in the second half, in which Hao Yi’s character is sidelined and the focus shifts more to Geng Hao and his ex, with some South Korean-style time-bending that gets in the way of the central male relationship. A coda, which updates the story to the present, seems a little tacked-on.
Widescreen photography by Song Xiaofei 宋晓飞 (Deadly Delicious 双食记, 2008; Cow 斗牛, 2009; Lost in Thailand) is good-looking when required in landscape shots but generally realistic and unobtrusive, while other technical credits are okay without being slick in any way. Though locations are not always specific, and there are large jumps in geography, the 3,000-kilometre journey appears to go due south from Beijing, via Hunan, Guizhou and Sichuan provinces, to Yunnan province; actual filming, in late 2013, was in Beijing, Hunan and Yunnan. The film’s Chinese title is an untranslatable pun on the four-character phrase 心花怒放 (“over the moon” or “bursting with happiness”).
For the record, one of the biggest laughs is in the title of Hao Yi’s movie (徐福你别走/Don’t Go, Xu Fu) that can be seen on the car he drives; it’s only fully explained in some dialogue that’s been cut but is still viewable online. In it, Hao Yi describes himself to Dongdong as “just a scungy producer” and his film as a big-budget costume time-travel movie in which boy soldier Zhang Ga goes back from the mid-20th century to the Qin dynasty and stops Xu Fu going east and discovering Japan, “thereby solving the Japan problem”. Zhang Ga was a fictional hero who joined the Eighth Route Army to avenge his grandmother’s death at the hands of the Japanese in the early 1940s; Xu Fu was an emissary of China’s first emperor who is popularly supposed to have settled in Japan, where his knowledge sparked the development of Japan to the present day. Reportedly, Ning intended to shoot a whole fake trailer for the movie but, alas, didn’t have time.
CREDITS
Presented by China Film (CN), Beijing Galloping Horse Film (CN), Beijing Asian Union Culture & Media Investment (CN), Talent International Film (CN), Beijing Shine Land Culture (CN), Beijing Yingyue Dongfang Culture Communication (CN), Beijing Huagai Yingyue Film & TV Culture Investment Management (CN), Beijing Skywheel Entertainment (CN), Huang Bo Studio (CN), Dirty Monkeys Studio (CN). Produced by Injo Films (CN), Huang Bo Studio (CN).
Script: Yue Xiaojun, Xing Aina, Sun Xiaohang, Dong Runnian, Zhang Disha, Zhang Yifan. Photography: Song Xiaofei. Editing: Du Yuan. Music: Wang Zongxian [Nathan Wang], Dong Dongdong. Art direction: Hao Yi. Costume design: Hao Yi. Sound: Wang Yanwei.
Cast: Huang Bo (Geng Hao), Xu Zheng (Hao Yi), Yuan Quan (Kang Xiaoyu), Zhou Dongyu (Zhou Lijuan/”Christina”), Tao Hui (Dongdong), Yue Xiaojun (Dali hotel owner; film director), Shen Teng (Dali bar owner), Zhang Li (Siqing, car beauty), Ma Su (Shasha, Dongbei call-girl), Liu Meihan (Hunan call-girl, Shasha’s companion), Wang Yanhui (gang boss), Jiao Junyan (Xiao Bei, Dongdong’s best friend), Guo Tao (divorce lawyer), Li Chen (Kang Xiaoyu’s new boyfriend), Xiong Naijin (bride at wedding), Xia Yu (Kang Xiaoyu’s former boyfriend at wedding), Liu Yiwei (Dali policeman), Lei Jiayin (gang boss’ underling), Jiang Zhentao (groom at wedding), Tan Zhiling (wife of Kang Xiaoyu’s former boyfriend; Dongdong’s Avatar co-dancer), Zhang Lei (wedding MC), Shao Kun (young tollbooth attendant), Yu Huaishi (middle-aged tollbooth attendant), Xiao Hongwen (Avatar show MC), Xu Ying (fat guy), Liang Jie (Li Maomao, Lijuan’s boyfriend), Yong Mengting (Lijuan’s cosplayer friend), Liu Shiliu (Lijuan’s uncle), Xie Chen (Nana, Siqing’s girlfriend), Wang Yanwei (Dali policeman).
Premiere: Toronto Film Festival (Special Presentations), 7 Sep 2014.
Release: China, 30 Sep 2014.
(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 20 Nov 2014.)