According to a whole hell of a lot of Chinese people, Gasp (气喘吁吁) is pretty much the worst movie ever made. (Clearly, these people have never seen He’s Just Not That Into Making The Stupidest Movie Ever.)
I, and approximately…one other person think that Gasp is on the of the most original, compelling Chinese movies this side of a ten minute Jia Zhang-Ke tracking shot. (No offense to good ol’ JZK, but this is a new kind of Chinese movie!)
Sure, it’s slightly rude and vaguely surrealist in a way that is totally unappealing to epic-loving Chinese audiences, but Gasp tackles some of the weightier issues of modern urban life in China with an incredible style and humor, even irony, rare to contemporary Chinese filmmaking.
The film tells the story of Frank (John Savage), a dopey Texan hit hard by the recession who travels to Beijing in hopes of selling his family cheese company to a Chinese investor. In Beijing, he encounters an outrageous cast of characters, from Mr. Lee (Ge You, one of the most famous comedians in China, for whom this movie represents a Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine-like leap), a business man in a serious life crisis, to aspiring starlets, lunatic business people, and a strange host of expats. Set almost entirely within Beijing, Gasp (directed by Beijinger Zheng Zhong, who penned 2004’s also-controversial, also-surrealistic Baober In Love) is political, timely, culturally significant, but it also succeeds on a much higher plane–it’s the first Chinese movie I’ve ever seen that is able to comment on the fact that China is such a totally bizarro place.
With a formal style that shows Beijing through Frank’s boggled, often baijiu-addled eyes, the film is spliced, diced, and often utterly baffling. Through jump cuts galore and strange slices of story, we see Beijing and all its denizens as complicated, miserable, ecstatic, hungry–a range of bizarre moods and appetites in this bizarre city. Chinese audiences may not like Gasp for the very reason I like it so much: it embraces China as an disjointed pastiche of old and new, an unresolved society with quirks and flaws to play with the best of ‘em. The film lacks a linear narrative structure, it jumps around and confuses–much like life in this and any city.
Gasp is part of a new generation of Chinese films that subscribe more to genre than previous generations and this comedy takes its humor like I take my coffee–black, black, black. There are some terrifically funny moments in the film: a model learns that she’s been hired only to showcase only her more…bulbous physical attributes, an African-American expat teaches Ebonics to a group of eager young Chinese, as well as a lot of Lost In Translation-style misunderstandings and mistranslations. That being said, this film may garner comparisons to Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation as a stranger-in-a-strange (Asian)-land story, but Gasp achieves what Coppola could not–a real attempt to understand China, beyond the facade of strange and different. Zheng Zhong is clearly influenced by a lot of global cinema, but think Jarmusch-style sensibility rather than the muted crises of Sofia Coppola’s work.
This film may resonate with me and not with Chinese audiences for several reasons–I’m an expat living in Beijing, I like weird films, I’m not easily offended by criticisms of China (or even the US, for that matter), but I think that this is, by and large, a film that will be mostly appreciated by a foreign, non-Chinese audience. Gasp is window into a China we’ve never seen on-screen before, a China that embraces style and wit and all the contradictions that make this place what it is.
The film isn’t perfect and does feel too fragmented and frantic at times, but it is also daring and original. The film also features a pretty badass soundtrack by Howie B and some incredible art direction and costume design, which can ice over even a crumbly film. It is my fervent hope that Gasp will be seen by an international audience some day and provide a jump-cut-laden, non-linear window into one of many crazy Beijing stories.
Trailer (no subtitles, but little dialog) can been seen here.
This entry was written by , posted on October 2, 2009 at 12:19 am, filed under art, beijing, film, style and tagged beiing film, beijing, film, gasp, zheng zhong. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.