Take One

If Beijing is the DC of China, Shanghai must be the New York. Though no Broadway, Shanghai has a history of performing arts. Its picturesque backdrops of European buildings has lent itself to old and new movies alike, including ‘Shanghai Tang’, which is also the name of an upscale boutique, and the recent ‘In the Mood for Love’ and ‘2046’, starring Hong Kong talents Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung.

On New Years Eve, a few of us went to see a live performance of ‘I Love You, Your Perfect, Now Change’, a popular off-Broadway musical that was recently adapted for Chinese audiences. Up to this point in time, all the musicals that have been performed in China have been direct transplants from Broadway, like the Lion King and the Phantom of the Opera, with Chinese subtitles. Hence, I was pretty excited to see what would become of a cheeky New York romance in the hands of a Chinese playwright. How would they preserve the catchy rhyming tunes? How would they translate words like ‘sex’? Would the adaptation exclude controversial scenes like a man and a woman falling in love at a funeral?

For the first time in China, the Chinese audience members were able to directly appreciate what the actors and actresses were saying (while us foreigners read the English subtitles). I couldn’t understand much of the Chinese, but the musical still rhymed in Chinese, with efforts to preserve the meaning. Groaning was replaced by ‘it gives me a headache’, and sex by ‘go to bed’. The controversial funeral scene wasn’t eliminated though anything more explicit certainly would not have passed muster. What was interesting too was that I think I laughed the loudest out of the few hundred people in the entire theater. The jokes were genuinely funny, but maybe westerners just happen to make a lot more noise when we are humored. We heard a few wholehearted yet subdued laughs from the audience, but not on the scale I would have expected from a Broadway crowd. This makes me wonder how ethnic culture shapes our respective concepts of happiness.

On a separate note, a group of us also recently went to see ‘The Curse of the Golden Flower’, a beautiful epic film set in the Tang Dynasty starring Gong Li (Memoirs of a Geisha) and Chow Yun Fat. In a long string of epic movies made by Chinese filmmakers in the past decade, beginning with ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’, this has to be the most jaw dropping one to date. The special effects, the costumes and the stage made my eyes want to pop out. I was told that 3,000 costumes were hand made for just one of the many battle scenes. I guess that’s appropriate when the main plot line involved the Empress making 10,000 chrysanthemum embroidered scarves in order to signify mutiny against an Emperor who was trying to poison her bit by bit because she slept with the crown prince.

Anyhow, ‘The Curse of the Golden Flower’ was chosen by Chinese officials as the China’s entry for the Best Foreign Film category at the Oscars. The locals tell us that epics like these are for foreigners. I find it a bit unfortunate that in order to get international recognition, that Chinese filmmakers are driven to produce period pieces that so clearly scream ‘I’m made in China about China’ because Hollywood demands it. There are plenty wonderful films set in modern day that are equally fascinating. My favorite is ‘Infernal Affairs’, a movie set in modern day Hong Kong about the relationship between a gang mole inside the police force and a police mole inside the triads. Chewy stuff.