Something is happening in Chinese Film, after decades of slim pickings. Their two most conspicuous talents have come back on line. Stephen Chow Sing-Chi has made his first film after seven years, Feng Xiaogang is doing serious work again and now, in quick succession, their two major new successes, Dear You and Once Upon a Time in the Middle East 歡迎來龍餐館 (Welcome to the Loong Restaurant) are in our local multiplexes. Of course that’s a suspect qualification. These come to our attention because they are, among the several hundred movies a year made by Chinese film industry, ones we can actually see and they are not aimed at movie enthusiasts. I was the only gweilo in the audience on the crowded opening night of Middle East at the George Centre. There may be better (and there certainly are worse) films and most won’t have the (good) two language export version sub-titles these get.
What is curious is that their accessibility is not the result of endorsement by festivals and film critics. Rotten Tomatoes has yet to acknowledge Middle East. IMDB has a couple of uninformative critics’ notices and some user comments, which once again appeared in a bunch and read as if they gushed out of a press office. At least the flacks have now got their act together on English language spelling and punctuation.
The big surprise was Hongchun Lan’s Gei a ma de qing shu/ Dear You, made on a modest budget in the Teochew regional dialect, while Beijing is trying to project the idea of a homogeneous Mandarin-speaking China. In Singapore, the theatre had to get special permission to screen it in the wake of a 1979 “Speak Mandarin” campaign. It was lying second in the year’s Chinese box office takings at last check.
In this one, young Zheng Runqi is deep in debt and hears about his grandfather who left provincial Chaoshan when menaced by conscription into Kuomintang forces during the Chinese Civil War, sending back qiaopiI/support contributions to his local wife, with letters the now elderly woman keeps in a trunk in her room. As a young emigrant, his grandfather is reputed to have started a second family and become rich out of the line of language schools named after him. Zheng conspires with an uncle to advance him the fare to Singapore, after stealing one of the grandmother’s cherished letters to find the sender’s return address, planning to demand his inheritance.
Arriving, Zheng and the film both face confusion. Dear You resembles the entries that filled out those eighties Asian Film Festivals. Japanese and Hong Kong titles and were approachable to audiences used to western films. Less “contaminated” viewers were used to different pacing and plot developments while their entries were demanding to outsiders.
Equipped with synopses and reviews I’m still shaky on some details here. Instead of the predictable pursuit of riches, we lose track of Zheng in a succession of flashbacks to his grandfather (Sitong Li) after his courtship of the younger edition of his grandmother (Xiaohui Wang). His pursuit of her as a traveling propaganda banner girl is particularly nice. In the South Asian new country, things don’t go to plan, including antagonising the daughter of his innkeeper landlord, she also being desired by the aggro professional letter writer, the actually author of the cherished envelopes (if Cyrano is stretching it, compare Kinuyo Tanaka’s 1953's Koibumi/Love Letter) and, still alive, he proves to be a major conduit into the details of the grandfather’s past. At this point, Zheng recedes and we find ourselves following the earlier generation, to the touching meeting with Usha Seamkhum, from the notable 2024 Bangkok Lahn Mah/How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies. She is the one celebrity in a largely non pro. cast, which registers affectingly.
The play-out title captions contain examples from the now vanished qiaopi industry sending money to original Chinese homes and and significantly financing the war against the Japanese invasion. These actual messages ramp up the already damp eyed content.
The film has been running for six weeks here, where Feng Xiogang’s I Know Who You Are limped through one. The film has outperformed far bigger budget productions in more widely spoken dialects, being the number two box office performer of the year for a while. More striking, the audience I saw it with didn’t shuffle off into the street at the end but stayed in their seats talking about it and even asked me about my reaction in the elevator afterwards. That all lobs between impressive and phenomenal and would be big news if it were not for a subsequent development.
Director Wen Muye’s new Once Upon a Time in the Middle East is even more impressive, using a substantiaI budget, with part shooting in IMAX and locations in the Sahara. I don’t get to see enough of these to talk about Chinese best ever but I’d have to go back to the peak years of King Hu to nominate a rival. It has already knocked out heavy competition to take the year’s number two box office champion spot - behind the third film of the Pegasus motor racing movie franchise, which also stars this film’s leading man, established comic Shen Teng.
This actually gives the producers a problem. They are using an advertising campaign with a beaming Shen in a chef suit. People have been taking their children and becoming indignant when faced with intense drama. I’d seen Sheng in a few earlier films (Zhang Yimou’s Manjianghong/Full River Red) without paying any particular notice. However in this one, Shen carries a two hours twenty narrative in which he is central, appearing in near to every scene.
We open with Shen, aged and scarfaced, escorted into an Airport Security Office, after a check reveals an old terrorist charge from which he assures them US authorities had cleared him. This is a script device which allows the film to break up the narrative by flashbacks - particularly effective in skipping over information which would have dissipated their ending.
Shen first appears as a Chinese master cook, so deep in debt that he abandons his mother (Wei Qing, the only female character to get any attention) and indignant daughter, once again to earn enough to put his life back on track, by working in a Middle East country which is obviously Iraq, here called Bahata. He is collected from the airport by head waiter fellow countryman Jiang Qiming, who has been abroad long enough to pick up the language and the conniving needed to get by. Jiang is alarmed by Shen’s audacity, making demands of authoritative Loong Restaurant owner Sherif Sobhy, with Shen announcing he’s not going to prepare the sweetened imitation Chinese cuisine American customers expect - and that he wants to be a full partner in the business. This face-off between the three is the point that we realise we are seeing something out of the ordinary here, with Jiang amazed at Shen’s daring and brought down because the newcomer’s negotiated the spot Jiang wanted.
However there is another set piece on the way - the first of the cooking segments. Shen is soon preparing the spectacular outdoors iron pot mutton wedding - close ups of a stunt kitchen-worker’s hand’s rung in for the dazzling knife skills. These scenes punctuate the film like musical numbers and rule it off from what we’ve see in material from other sources. Food is constantly foregrounded in Chinese cinema but this must qualify as its most spectacular presentation. The actual kitchen footage is stunning, leaving the Cooking Shows and TV Commercial Product Shots we are used to in its dust - even if one of Shen’s specialties is candied scorpions.
Middle East has something more startling. The film’s real set piece occurs early, when the comparative calm is destroyed with a sudden 9/11 retaliation bombing raid. Entire city blocks explode around the leads, running for their lives, stamping on the head of a dead man in their panic. This is one of the most shocking pieces of film ever and it is an act of supreme confidence that the makers place it so early - like burning Atlanta before the interval.
Complications ensue with the children from the orphanage run by Jiang’s lady friend, now without shelter. Shen is equal to the challenge and soon has them sleeping on the floor and waiting tables in Loong Restaurant uniforms. Hang the child labor laws! Pilfering teenager Omar Sherif is caught out and abused for taking supplies when they are desperately short but that turns into one of the film’s most compelling sub plots. One of the strengths is the way of introducing characters as bit players, only to reveal they represent major plot elements. We are however getting ahead of ourselves.
Their needs mean contact with the black market which will make the operation boom when the Ba’athist Government falls and Sobhy becomes an official under the American occupation. Shen clears his debts but is lured by the cash flow from manipulating supplies, keeping The Loong Restaurant open on power permits Sobhy connives while their competitors have gone dark and serves liquor in a country where it’s forbidden.
However they are operating just outside the Green Zone, living with violence and danger. The proximity of military prison Camp Alifah reveals insurgent leader Ahmed Salim, “The Headmaster” strung up naked, with Shen able to ease some of his suffering by faking the chilli water jailers funnel into him. At this point the post is over run and roles reversed with Shen struggling to prevent his own young deputy taking savage revenge.
What is already a strong drama is further powered up by the introduction of child soldiers in training. Wen Muye's care in finding the most vulnerable and appealing looking young performers is deliberate. A checkpoint bombing is as startling as its counterpart in Raffi Pitts’ Soy Negro - which I notice no one has still been sufficiently enterprising to show here. We get the “Open Your mouth!” and “I promised God five children” scenes.
Of course, coming from a Chinese Marxist society the question is not just how good it is but what is it telling us. The Party Newspaper has reportedly endorsed this one. The film shows Americans in a country where they have no place to be, dying in encounters which provoke drunken survivors to murderous rage. But they are also pitiful, victims of power politics they will never understand. The Jihadis come out of things even worse, justifying their barbarism with allegiance to a God the film makers don’t believe exists. Though no one mentions El Qaida or Abu Ghraib, these are clearly models. The Chinese characters crave a peace which harms no one. Can’t argue with that, though how far it all corresponds with reality is something to question in some other space.
Once Upon a Time in the Middle East is a mix of expat. drama, military spectacle, imposing Egyptian performers, Soy Negro and Gone With the Wind - only with candied scorpions. It is a movie everyone should see but not everyone will enjoy. Either way, anyone with a serious interest in film, or for that matter a casual one, should rush down to the local multiplex and watch it. Whether this one gets past the one week that Feng Xioagang limped through and scores the attention it deserves, as a major production, is yet to be seen.
