The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison casts an eye on the smash hit Chinese comedy SUCCESSOR /ZHUA WA WA (Yan Fei & Peng Damo, China, 2024)

It's some time since I saw a new Chinese film that I liked. Zhang Yimou hasn't been exactly luminous of late. Feng Xiaogang is sheltering in If You Are the One Sequels and TV series, while old Hong Kong favorites like Tsui Hark, Stephen Chow & Johnnie To seem to have been resting on their laurels. I set my hopes on big new popular success Zhua wa wa/ Successor, from the Fei Yan, Bingbao Lin, Da-Mo Peng team whose work I don't know. Bad guess. This one turns out to be a nasty rip-off of The Truman Show.

Risen from poverty, industrial Czar Teng Shen screwed up raising his wastrel elder son, so he resolved to do things right with second son Bochen Xiao, who grows to be Pengyuan Shi. The father moves his family back into his old home tenement, which he peoples with actors representing life lessons. Comic scene of Dad carried off in the donkey cart which he can't control, purporting to be the family business.

Exemplary teacher Rina Sa (good) is cast as the boy's bedridden granny, while his genuine grandparents, when they are allowed a visit pretending to be strangers, have to outsmart dad by concealing a gift banknote in Gramps' hair. This is transferred to the biscuit tin of savings for later life, They put the boy in charge of it as a test of his business training – getting an iPhone on a seven-day free trial, collecting refundable plastic bottles on an industrial scale etc. When he has gone to sleep after a hard day at chores and lessons, Teng Shen and wife Li Ma get into the elevator concealed in the closet and descend into Command Central, where experts are studying and charting their son's experience to prepare him for acquiring control of the family's millionaire business empire. This was quite funny when it was Bernard Blier having his kids fostered into Public Assistance till they emerged at the age of eighteen, rendered vicious by their harsh experiences, to be reclaimed by the proud father. Here it's deep into child abuse.

The older son reappears in a dreadful scene where he is taken for a rich child molester. Pengyuan Shi's interest in track and field is suppressed by daubing him with sense-numbing drugs and when Rina Sa blows her cover by joining a basketball game, the family comes up with a fake death for the fake granny and her fake cremation, where the kid is clearly heartbroken. The target ethnic audience I saw the film with thought this was hilarious. Cultural dissonance rampant.

While Pengyuan Shi is in training at business college, the charade explodes and the film does a U-Turn into high seriousness. Brigitte Helm finding Jack Trevor's Abwege portraits of her is eclipsed. This does go some way towards redeeming what we've been watching. However, the Paris Olympics finale undermines even this. What happened to the nice young woman who took an interest in our hero?

Film-making and performances are assured. Money has been spent on this one and the makers appear to have judged their market expertly. However, what are we to make of a Beijing movie where the “deviant” westernised couple are presented as admirable and the successful worker impresario (do we have Capitalist Roaders anymore?) is a figure of ridicule. I'm sure theses exploring this are being bound even as we speak. I just don't want to see any more movies like it