We should note that Feng Xiaogang's third Fei cheng wu rao / If you Are the One film has opened with a 2024 date on the credits.
While critics were documenting the persistence of Zhang Yimou and his Gong Li cycle, Feng Xiaogang wowed his home ground viewers with a succession of productions that impressed both his intended audience and the small number foreign enthusiasts who discovered him. We heard about a Theme Park with rides based on his hits. He made the first Chinese IMAX film.
Feng was one of the filmmakers whose career managed to run level with the home video cycle. Enormous numbers particularly of DVDs were pressed to meet the demand of the audience which poured into his films. Sure enough quantities of these made it to Australia where they ended up in the Asian food store sale bins going for chump change. He is probably the only major filmmaker on whom I managed to find every title from his 2004 Tian xia wu zei / A World Without Thieves onwards.
The films that pulled me up short were the first two enormously popular If You Are the Ones. These were movies in which it was glorious to be rich. You Ge, the leading man, who also appears as the star of the work of other major Chinese filmmakers, including Zang Yimou, Ann Hui and Chen Kaige, is not a conventionally handsome man, something he emphasizes by appearing with his head shaved and wearing wire rimmed glasses. We first see his character in formal clothes, falling down drunk at a rich person reception. He's the opposite pole to the conventional idealised Maoist hero and his exploits confirm that - speed dating, a luxury cruise, a Catholic Church confession, attending a mob funeral and enjoying the whole mechanism of Conspicuous Consumption. The audience gasp seeing his luxury pool deck at night. No shonky CommieColour here either - full spectrum wide screen lab work.
The sequel makes this point even more firmly, continuing the central relationship - romance would be putting it too strong - with glamorous air hostess Shu Qi and rushing to the funeral of his magnate friend who proves to still be alive but wanting to share the ceremony with friends before his fatal ailment strikes.
Maybe that one has a certain stiffness showing the age difference central couple but it is even more of a show stopper as a consideration of the China of it's day. Much pondering on the place of the rich. ("we take their money and humiliate them") with the industrialist pleased that his pre-teen daughter is reading Marx with approval. "Better a Communist that a miser." Exactly what message we are meant to take away from it all is hard to tell.
There are constant back references to the first two films in the new production - another visit to the Four Sisters bar run by the sixty year olds, whose photo as glamorous juveniles stands in the foyer, the recap of the rich man's sombre final scene, another appearance by his daughter and by the gay candidate who joined Ge's speed date line, saying there wasn't any specific prohibition against him. The film's unspoken subject is the passage of time.
Particularly interesting is the fact that Feng puts up the future as what we see in the Barbie movie, of which we can consider this the first of a line of rip-offs headed towards us. The pastel shades and fringe science fiction details signal this. Add in an epilogue where the lead duo appear as themselves (think Stanley Kwan's Centre Stage) discussing the way their world has changed since the first movie. Pirandello in Chinese.
As promised in the earlier films, the lead characters marry in 2030, but part when she joins the international rubbish clearing group. The ecology theme is underlined with shots of driving the highway through a spectacular wind farm. The new movie however homes in on A. I., with scientist Wei Fan having perfected the making of simulated humans and providing Ge with a duplicate of Shu to meet (most of) his companion needs in that spectacular Hainan Province mountainside home we remember from the last movie, now reminding us of Shi with a wall of the ten years of post cards she has sent
Ah, but there's more - think Hoffman, Lubitsch and Patricia Roc in Bernard Knowles 1949 The Perfect Woman. A comparison between the two films is a good indicator of growing sophistication in film making. One of the most deft touches is Feng managing to put the big surprise across to the audience just before the on-screen characters catch on. The still so attractive Shu Qi differentiates her original and fake selves impeccably. The split screen effects work and the performers' participation can't be faulted.
Apparently, If You Are the One 3 has not had the anticipated block buster success of its predecessors, which is to be regretted.
Feng Xiaogang has been a film maker in eclipse since the uneasy reception to his I Am Not Madam Bovary - with its depiction of petty corruption - one of the things the regime is supposed to be hammering. He's done a soppy New Zealand romance, TV serieses, his lead performance in Mr. Six and a new Cell Phone movie. This is hardly an extension of the line of his former exceptional work - compare Madam Bovary, Aftershock. Assembly and Youth. If You Are the One 3 should have been be a step in the right direction. Not a film for everyone but one for the serious audience to prioritize.
