Of all the genres traditionally favoured by Chinese filmmakers – historical dramas, martial art epics, comedy – the latter is perhaps the least accessible to international audiences. With its quick-fire dialogue, rapid cuts, absurdist satire and brash cinematography, contemporary Chinese comedy tends to leave outsiders baffled.
Writer-director Hu Guan’s new film, The Chef, The Actor, The Scoundrel (厨子戏子痞子), is likely to do little to broach the cross-cultural comedic abyss, despite the filmmaker’s intentions to break with the genre’s conventions. But audiences who are fond of his promising earlier efforts, Cow and Design of Death, should be curious to see this chameleon filmmaker’s latest turn.
‘My original intention [with this film] was to throw myself into mass entertainment,’ says Guan. ‘But I don’t want to pander to the current situation [in Chinese comedy]…I hope it will make money and be liked by the audience, but I refuse to sacrifice my style.’
Defining that style is difficult since Guan’s oeuvre is so varied. He initially made his directorial mark with Dirt (1994), a low-budget take on the underground Beijing rock scene that justifiably got Guan lumped in with the Sixth Generation – the post-1989 movement characterised by low-budget production values and affection for ethereal camerawork. Guan isn’t entirely comfortable with this. Indeed his next films, such as Cello in a Cab and Eyes of a Beauty, were cosy domestic dramas and distanced his style from the raw Sixth Generation aesthetic. Between 2002-2009 he didn’t release any films at all, working in television dramas to make ends meet, before making his soulful, critically acclaimed works Cow and Design of Death.
The Chef, meanwhile, is set in familiar Chinese film surroundings: the Sino-Japanese war. It’s 1942 and a besieged Beijing is suffering a famine. Hungry and desperate, a scoundrel (Huang Bo) kidnaps two Japanese biochemical experts and takes them to a Japanese restaurant inhabited by an enigmatic opera actor (Zhang Hanyu). Much of the plot pivots on the question of what to do with the Japanese captives; the actor would kill them, the chef (Liu Ye) would release them. Just before havoc descends, it is discovered that the experts are carrying the cure for cholera, and the three greedy parties decide to steal the secret to sell to authorities, sharing the spoils.
While Guan makes it clear that his film is more of a fable about power and morality than another drama cashing in on anti-Japanese sentiment, he is blunt about his aspirations of box office success: ‘It sounds utilitarian, but I just want to prove that I have the ability to be successful at the box office.’
The Chef, The Actor, The Scoundrel is in cinemas from March 29
