To Gather Around
胜券在握
China, 2024, colour, 2.35;1, 135 mins.
Director: Liu Xunzimo 刘循子墨.
Rating: 7/10.
A dark satire of big-business ethics and corporate culture that loses its way in the final third but features strong playing, especially from lead Deng Chao.
STORY
A city somewhere in China, Nov 2021. Bai Sheng (Deng Chao), 35, is a programmer in the support department of giant Altrance Network Technology, a highly desirable company for the ambitious but one which heavily monitors its employees. Bai Sheng has worked there from the company’s beginnings, about a decade ago. He now owes a large sum to debt collector Hao (Yang Haoyu) but has promised to get him the money quickly. Bai Sheng is quietly asked by Fang Fang (Deng Jiajia), from the personnel department, whether he can help her: her application for a pre-natal leave of absence has been blocked by her supervisor, but Bai Sheng could unblock it as he has the security clerance to get into the central server. He politely refuses. When the company is forced to make lay-offs, Zhang Jian (Zhang Benyu), head of the efficiency and optimisation department, is promosed a seat on the board of he can handle it well. When Bai Sheng observes some of the grief caused by the lay-offs, he changes Fang Fang’s file one day – unblocking her application for leave – while doing maintenance on the central server. But then Bai Sheng is suddenly laid off, after years of devoted service. He personally begs Zhang Jian to rescind the decision but Zhang Jian refuses, saying Bai Sheng knows too much about everyone from all his years working at Altrance. Pressured over his debt by Hao, Bai Sheng says he’ll get his job back by letting the company know how much his knowledge could help its competitors, especially in developing a new form of AI. This creates waves within Altrance’s management and ammunition for the continuing battle between executives Zhang Jian and Ren Yuanlao (Yu Entai), head of the personnel department. Finally Ren Yuanlao has the idea of letting Bai Sheng start his own company within Altrance: Altrance will provide office space and salaries, and Bai Sheng can build his own team; he’ll be completely independent of Altrance but will answer to Ren Yuanlao and not go anywhere else. Bai Sheng invites Fang Fang to join him; she agrees, as her supervsior wants to get rid of her before she has her child. She helps him put together a core team of the best, including Harley (Ke Da), head of Altrance’s tech team, and Johnny (Li Naiwen), head of marketing and public relations. Bai Sheng calls the company Bubble Factory 泡泡工厂, and deliberately makes it the complete opposite of Altrance, with a relaxed and cooperative atmosphere and free of protocols. That soon changes, however, when Ren Yuanlao appoints his own “monitor” to spy on everybody – the soulless young bureaucrat Zhou Wanggao (Zheng Yunlong), who starts creating problems for everyone. Bai Sheng’s team also begins to doubt whether his super-AI project they’re meant to be working on can ever really work. And then Zhou Wanggao does some private research in Altrance’s archives about Zhang Jian, Ren Yuanlao and Bai Sheng.
REVIEW
A year after corporate satire Johnny Keep Walking! 年会不能停！ (2023), along comes another blast against the ethics and conduct of big business in the form of To Gather Around 胜券在握, the second theatrical feature by Beijing-born actor-writer-director Liu Xunzimo 刘循子墨, 38. A much darker satire of corporate culture than Johnny, it reunites many of the same people in front of and behind the camera (including the four writers) who worked on Liu’s black crime comedy Be Somebody 扬名立万 (2021). It also has some of the same faults, chiefly an inability to know when enough is enough. Despite that, it has a strong first two-thirds, a terrific lead in comedian Deng Chao 邓超, 46, as the laid-off programmer who’s determined to revenge himself on the company he devoted his life to, and a strong supporting cast down the line. However, it failed to replicate Johnny’s billion-plus box office, taking only a polite RMB204 million, way down on Somebody’s tasty RMB927 million three years earlier.
Where Johnny, headed by larger-than-life actor Da Peng 大鹏, took a more extrovert approach to its subject, To Gather Around takes its lead from the lower-key, more realist style of Deng. As the loyal, longtime employee who politely turns down a request to doctor a co-worker’s file, and then finds he’s been stiffed by a jealous executive and laid off, Deng humanises what could have been a soulless expose of big-business shenanigans with a natural, lightly comic performance. Like Johnny, though in a different way, Gather is ultimately a plea for some humanity in the way corporates conduct themselves, and a warning not to forget those who really contribute to the success of their business. It’s a theme that resonates as much – if not more – in present-day China as anywhere else.
Altrance, the tech monster that Bai Sheng (Deng) works for, is portrayed as a cold and emotionless place – underlined by the grey interiors of art director Li Anran 李安然 and d.p. Qian Tiantian 钱添添 – where staff are surveilled round the clock. After literally begging the exec in charge of lay-offs (actor/co-scripter Zhang Benyu 张本煜, superb as the grinning villain) and being utterly rejected, Bai Sheng plots his revenge, playing into a rivalry between the exec and a rival, Ren Yuanlao (Yu Entai 喻恩泰).
The rival, who’s head of HR, allows Bai Sheng to set up his own independent company within Altrance, poach his own staff from Altrance, and answer only to him. Bai Sheng’s carrot is a super-AI project he claims to be developing; but just to make sure Bai Sheng stays on course, Ren Yuanlao saddles him with a “monitor” who reports everything back. Played by Zheng Yunlong 郑云龙 as an emotionless, hawk-like robot, the ultimate corporate bureaucrat, this apparently soulless character and his relationship with the risk-taking, improvisatory Bai Sheng powers the remainder of the film, sometimes at the expense of Deng’s central portrayal. It’s a notable role for Qingdao-born singer-actor Zheng (the sappy man-in-the-middle in female drama The Chanting Willows 柳浪闻莺, 2021) and it’s to the 34-year-old’s credit that he manages to believably morph the character of Zhou Wanggao into a recognisable human being as the plot develops.
The problem with the film is not the performances, which are all precisely drawn, but with the structure of the screenplay by Li Bashen 里八神 (pen name of Chen Si 陈思), Liu, Zhang and actor-writer Ke Da 柯达 (who also plays a bespectacled tech geek). After reaching a natural climax around the 90-minute mark, the film goes on for another 45 minutes, belatedly filling in a lot of emotional and personal background on Bai Sheng, Zhou Wanggao, a loyal female staffer (Deng Jiajia 邓家佳, in the film’s only sizeable female role), a slick PR guy (Li Naiwen 李乃文, the corrupt vice-chairman in Johnny) and a debt-collector (Yang Haoyu 杨皓宇) on Bai Sheng’s tail. This whole final section has none of the tension of the first two-thirds and is way over-stretched even by its own standards. Even after the end titles there are still two more, completely unnecessary scenes
The film’s English title is even worse (and more meaningless) than that for Johnny. The original Chinese one is a phrase meaning “success within one’s grasp”.
CREDITS
Presented by Beijing Unimedia Film (CN), Tianjin Maoyan Weiying Cultural Media (CN), Beijing Enlight Pictures (CN), Shanghai Taopiaopiao Movie & TV Culture (CN), China Film (CN), Shanghai Dimension Films (CN). Produced by Beijing Unimedia Film (CN).
Script: Li Bashen, Liu Xunzimo, Zhang Benyu, Ke Da. Script advice: A Nuo [Zhang Shoujun]. Photography: Qian Tiantian. Editing: Jin Shuang. Music: Shen Bi’ang [Björn Shen]. Art direction: Li Anran. Costumes: Shan Xingxing. Styling: Lu Wenhua. Sound: Cao Dahu, Zhang Zhenyu. Visual effects: Huang Yunfeng, Cao Ping. Executive direction: Wang Zhun.
Cast: Deng Chao (Bai Sheng), Deng Jiajia (Fang Fang), Zheng Yunlong (Zhou Wanggao), Yu Entai (Ren Yuanlao, personnel department head), Zhang Benyu (Zhang Jian, efficiency & optimisation department head), Ke Da (Halei/Harley, technical team head), Li Naiwen (Johnny, marketing & public relations department head), Yang Haoyu (Hao), Ning Li (Wang Tianrun, chairman), Chen Minghao (Duan Wenkang), Bai Ke (banking subsidiary boss), Tong Chenjie (Xu, chief financial officer), Xiao’ai (chief programmer), Li Xiaochuan (sacked employee), Bu Yu (Duan Wenkang’s secretary), Zhang Yijie (Mai Shuangcheng), Qu Zheming (Ma Zongbao), Qu Gaowei (optimisation department administrative representative), Liu Xunzimo (gaming subsidiary boss), Chen Siyu (Li Xinran), Huang Erchun (Zhuanzhuan), Bai Yufei (Xiaoye), Chi Peng (Bai Sheng’s mother), Zhang Yuhao (optimisation department employee), Jia Shuhan (Johnny’s ex-wife), Yu Baishui (sick man).
Release: China, 15 Nov 2024.