The posters for Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith are everywhere in Beijing. The hype, though, hasn’t resulted in queues outside cinemas. The rest of the world might be in thrall to George Lucas’s space saga, but in China, Revenge of the Sith is just another Hollywood movie. Despite ample coverage in the local media, it took a middling $3.3m at the Chinese box office in its first week on release.
In contrast, Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle made $7.7m in its first weekend. The tale of a hapless would-be Shanghai gangster, played by Chow, who turns out to be a kung-fu master, it is perhaps the first postmodern martial-arts movie. An inventive and stylised blend of comedy, action and sophisticated CGI sequences, it tips its hat to the kung-fu films of the past while keeping its tongue firmly in its cheek and mercilessly parodying po-faced western imitations such as the Matrix movies.
“I wanted to pay my respects to the classic oldies, but I kept thinking, ‘How can I pay homage while showing audiences my movie is new and unique?’” says the Hong Kong-based Chow, who directed and co-wrote Kung Fu Hustle as well as starring in it. “I hope western audiences will still appreciate the old kung-fu movies after watching my film, but, for me, a good director is a daring director, so I wanted to try something different.”
The success of Kung Fu Hustle shows how the Chinese have turned their back on Hollywood as their own film industry flourishes. China produced a record 212 movies last year, making its industry the third largest in the world, after Hollywood and Bollywood. When Zhang Yimou’s Hero topped the US box-office charts in August last year, it sent a message that Chinese films are more than capable of competing with western movies.
More significantly, 2004 was the first year in which home-grown films outperformed their Hollywood competition in China. It is a momentous change. Western films were allowed into China only in 1995, and were immediately so successful that many local films were ignored. The impact of Titanic, which generated box-office receipts that have been surpassed only by Hero, suggested that Hollywood would leave the Chinese film industry floundering in its wake. “When Hollywood films first came here, people were excited, because they wanted to see foreign films for the first time,” says Grace Deng, a lecturer at the Beijing Film Academy, where Zhang Yimou and most of China’s top film-makers trained. “Now, that whole phenomenon has cooled down. Because of the internet and DVDs, people have access to far more films, so they don’t think it’s necessary to go to the cinema to watch American movies any more.”
Instead, as China celebrates 100 years of movie-making, it is Chinese films that are making inroads in the West. Whether it is comedies such as Kung Fu Hustle, the sweeping historical epics that Zhang Yimou specialises in, or the contained, dreamlike world of Wong Kar-Wai, whose In the Mood for Love and 2046 have made him the art-house director du jour, Chinese cinema is on a roll that has left Hollywood scrambling to catch up — and Chinese actors and directors are in demand.
Chow Yun-Fat, who starred in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, has been tipped to play the villain in the next two Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and Michelle Yeoh, his co-star, is touted to appear in the next Mission: Impossible, while Zhang Ziyi landed the lead role in the long-awaited Memoirs of a Geisha. Nicole Kidman is heading in the other direction; she plans to star in Wong’s The Lady from Shanghai. None of this surprises Stephen Chow. “Audiences everywhere will always appreciate movies of quality, and we have some great directors and actors,” says the 42-year-old. “Maybe, too, foreigners are more open to watching Chinese movies. I think distances and regional boundaries are less important now.”
Jiang Li Fen, a 29-year-old director whose first film, White Gar-denia, is released later this year, agrees. “China is so much more open now, and any film can be released overseas,” she says. Like many local film-makers, she bristles at the suggestion that Chinese films were not good enough to succeed overseas until Zhang Yimou and Wong came along. “We’ve always made excellent films, but they weren’t shown outside. It’s not because the quality of Chinese films has improved.”
Certainly, there’s a long history of movie-making in China. Films were being shown in Shanghai as far back as 1896, and by 1905, the Chinese had started shooting their own. In the 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai’s Star Studios became the centre of the Chinese industry, cranking out movies by the week and creating stars such as Ruan Lingyu, Butterfly Hu and Zhao Dan.
Shanghai was then the most decadent city in the world, a place where criminals and adventurers rubbed shoulders with English bankers and Russian aristocrats-turned-prostitutes in nightclubs and opium dens. It is a world that has been rediscovered by Chinese and foreign film-makers in movies such as the upcoming Jasmine Women, directed by Yong Hou, and The White Countess, the last Merchant Ivory film, an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel When We Were Orphans starring Ralph Fiennes and Natasha Richardson.
For Ruan Lingyu, who rose from the poverty of a peasant family in the south of China to become the most famous Chinese actress of her time, it was too much. She committed suicide in 1935, at the age of 24, after being dumped by her gangster boyfriend. By then, however, thousands of young women were trying to emulate her success. Among them was Jiang Qing, who would marry the future Chairman Mao in 1939. She appeared in just one film, despite a reputation for sleeping with anyone who might advance her career.
When Mao took power in 1949, though, it signalled the end of the glamorous age of Chinese cinema. In the 1950s, film-makers were encouraged to make propaganda movies about the Sino-Japanese war or the Great Leap Forward. Worse was to come. The Cultural Revolution began in 1966, and Jiang Qing took her revenge on the film-makers who had spurned her in the 1930s. China’s leading directors were exiled to the regions to make industrial training films, and not one feature film was made on the mainland for six years.
In Hong Kong and Taiwan, however, cinema flourished. King Hu’s 1969 masterpiece A Touch of Zen reinvented the swordplay genre to which Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers belong, while Bruce Lee became Asian cinema’s first superstar. “My first movie experience was watching Fist of Fury. I was overwhelmed by Bruce Lee’s performance,” recalls Stephen Chow.
