Zhong Guo he huo ren

I thought Chan Ho-sun's latest movie, American Dreams in China, would be a more masculine version of Zhao Wei's So Young. But not quite, as it turns out.

Although the film depicts a nostalgic campus life full of idealism for the future and the impulses of love, the story is more about starting out after innocent youth has faded.

Through the intertwined destinies of the movie's protagonists, the audience witnesses a triangle of friendship, career ambitions and personal dreams seemingly collapse as three best friends desperately try to tie and twist these elements together.

That's why Wang Yang (Tong Dawei), one of the three best friends, who start a business together, shares this lesson of life: "Never start a business with your best friends."

He may be right. After all, no matter how close they are, differences in their professional and personal aspirations can drive friends apart. Every individual has a distinct outlook on the world and their future, which determines the trajectory of their career and life.

Without knowing of Meng Xiaojun's (Deng Chao) struggles in the US and his disillusion toward the country, there's no way Cheng Dongqing (Huang Xiaoming) can understand why Meng is pushing all the agendas so hard. The parting of the invincible trio, to some extent, is predestined.

Even so, despite these differences, friendship always prevails. Cheng's difficulties become a podium on which the three friends stand together. It's through the emotional connection they developed over many years that they finally overcome their differences and reform the alliance.

What the film tries to convey is the triumph of brotherhood, which dates back to our naive, passionate youth when unconditional bonds of emotion are shaped.

So the film was never about business after all.

A person is bound to act strangely when losing at love and life. Some channel the failure into better things. In a true story, three entrepreneurs take some lumps from classrooms, random grouches, consulates, love, and each other, and manage to turn things around. They come up from depths of despair with jewels found in their hearts. With straight talk, humor and personal stories, these three turn English language classes in an abandoned factory, along with broken dreams, into a billion dollar empire. While ripe with awkward moments, inadequately developed themes, and scenes that are difficult to translate, this is a compelling tale, finely portrayed, of dealing with adversity, following your bliss and hidden talents, and letting the rest go. Seen at the 2014 Miami International Film Festival.

Never has there quite been a film which has so pointedly addressed China's complex love affair with the West as Peter Chan's latest work 'American Dreams in China', a presciently timed movie given the country's rising power on the international stage. Tapping into the contemporary Zeitgeist of the Chinese pursuit of the American dream, it sees Chan revisiting his familiar themes of love and friendship as he charts the ups and downs of three college friends over three decades who build a business empire on an English-language school.

Beginning with the end, Chan introduces us to his protagonists - Cheng Dongqing (Huang Xiaoming), Meng Xiaojun (Deng Chao) and Wang Yang (Tong Dawei) - as they are called to New York to answer allegations by the United States' Educational Testing System (ETS) that they had been using ETS material within their school curriculum without permission. Because this isn't a whodunit, there isn't any doubt that the allegations are indeed true; what remains to be seen however is how they got from chasing the American dream to selling others the pathway to make that dream a reality.

That story takes us back to their university days in the early 1980s during the era of the Economic Reform. Whereas Dongqing is a quiet and bookish country boy, his mates couldn't be more different - Xiaojun, the de facto leader of the trio, is ambitious and self-confident, while Wang Yang is carefree and hedonistic. Yet all three are united in a common desire of going to America, a land perceived to be one of equal opportunities that rewards the hardworking; nonetheless, they will soon discover that passion alone ain't enough - even after several rounds of interviews, only Xiaojun gets the student visa each one of them wants, leaving Dongqing and Wang Yang behind as he alone gets to live out their collective dreams.

Herein is where irony sets in. Still dejected from not being able to go to the United States, Dongqing instead takes up a job as an English teacher - but a not so good one at that at least at the start. With Wang Yang's financial help though, he taps on his own thirst for making that journey to America to become a stirring motivator for countless others like him, thereby turning a hole-in-the-wall teaching establishment named New Dream into a profit-making enterprise. On the other hand, Xiaojun isn't having such a good time in America, his seemingly bright and perfect future crashing down when he is sacked from his laboratory job and forced to work as a waiter at a restaurant under a bigoted Caucasian boss.

All that is packed into the first hour of the film, which uses frequent monologues and voiceovers to provide the narrative continuity necessary for such a sprawling tale. Yet even though the characters are defined well enough, their joys, disappointments and frustrations rarely stick, primarily because Zhou Zhiyong and Zhang Ji's screenplay (based upon Aubrey Lam's draft) doesn't give Chan much breathing space in between the individual ups and downs to dwell on quieter character moments. And so, though we get Chan's intention of painting a cautionary tale on ambition, idealism and reality, it ultimately rings a little too hollow, coming off more superficial than poignant.

Thankfully, the movie finds a surer dramatic footing in its second half as Xiaojun heads back to China to join his buddies to bring New Dream to greater heights. Illustrating how business interests can sometimes ruin the firmest of friendships, Chan patiently observes Dongqing and Xiaojun's conflicting goals for the company, exemplified particularly in the latter's insistence of - and the former's resistance against - an IPO launch on the New York Stock Exchange. At its most effective, Chan's story is a coming-of-age tale of three friends whose bond is tested by power, money and ambition - though it does take a longer time than it could have to reward audiences with an emotional payoff.

It is also for this reason that despite Chan's attempt to emulate the success of his 'Comrades, Almost A Love Story' - right down to framing the tale against memorable events in China's history such as the first KFC in 1992 and the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 - this supposed true story of the Beijing New Oriental School isn't quite as accomplished. There's also no denying the political subtext of the film, expressed in no unclear terms by Dongqing in a didactic speech that in a nutshell demands that the West pay more respect to China and its people - in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, we might have excused it as ineptitude; but in Chan's case, one can only conclude the heavy- handedness comes from a deliberate attempt to pander to Mainland audiences.

Still, to give credit where that's due, Chan does get career-best performances from his Mainland stars. Made to downplay his good looks, Huang Xiaoming puts aside his swagger and is nicely understated as the shy Dongqing who comes into his own as a firm and resolute personality along the course of the film. Deng Chao projects just the right amount of poise without becoming supercilious, and surprisingly emerges as the most empathetic of the lot especially as his self-confidence takes a beating. Though he gets slightly less attention than Huang and Deng, Tong Dawei is also extremely likable as the most good-natured of the three.

In them and their characters is probably where Chan also sees himself. It's no secret that Chan now has his eyes firmly on the China market, but Chan's strengths as a filmmaker still triumph over his newfound commercial sensibilities, and even if this latest isn't as compelling as it could have been, it is at least never less than engaging.

During the economic reform period of the 80's, three friends bind together by a common ambition – to live the American dream. The three leads Huang Xiao Ming, Deng Chao and Tong Dawei create a very believable camaraderie. It is possible to be happy for your friend doing well and envy him at the same time, and that is the central story between these three friends. Huang Xiao Ming brings his best performance thus far. He's not busy preening for the camera and posing a pretty boy as I have seen in his past works. It's partly the role itself as it asks Huang to start by playing a vulnerable teenage boy who eventually that ages into a man.

There's a trend of using very fast cuts in Mainland comedies right now. It originated with Ning Hao's 2006 heist comedy Crazy Stone - which drew its visual style from Guy Ritchie - and now it has officially embedded itself genetically as filmic grammar for Chinese comedic dialogue. There's a scene where two of the friends had a fight and complain about each other individually with the third friend over a ping pong game. The cutting is so fast between conversation A and conversation B that it's impossible for the audience to really feel what these characters are going through. These montages will happen every now and then to speed the story ahead. It's zany for sure, but at times I wish they would let the scenes breathe instead of zeroing in for laughs.

That said, it's smart on Peter Chan's part of picking up on this trend and using it here because American Dreams in China is a Mainland Chinese story made for the Mainland audience. The content may prove more difficult with English-speaking audiences whom aren't aware of the cultural context or why the 3 friends carry the values they do about America and the American Dream to laugh at it whole-heartedly.

Suffice to say, Chan balances the film well and it is impressive to see a Hong Kong director tune to a Mainland frequency. Best thing I can say about Peter Chan's direction is that he is worldly. He doesn't portray Americans as white devils, which makes things more interesting and engaging. American Dreams in China will connect with its audience, namely Chinese people who were born in the 80's, and those people will enjoy it. Everybody else I am not so sure but this is a nice gem of a film nonetheless.

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Technically I think this movie's made very well, but its message is very nationalistic and panders to the Chinese Communist Party and the masses (which is fair enough I suppose for a commercial film).

Especially the film's latter half focuses on the rise of China, and there is a clear message that Chinese people are inherently cleverer, more moral and generally better than stupid Americans who are only economically at the top due to their aggressiveness and luck. There's also a very odd message in the film about racism in the USA, which seems quite irrelevant to the plot of the film and just another way for the film to push home the message that Chinese people are a better people than Americans.

If you don't read into the message too much (which is hard considering how hard it's pushed home), it's quite an enjoyable film of three young men's struggle and rise to the top.