Summary
Have you ever really wanted to watch a soap opera but don’t have the time? This new Chinese film is like an entire season crammed into a single feature – with dancing!
Just in time for Mother’s Day comes Chinese dramedy I AM YOUR MOM (我是你妈). It’s a little bit like buying your mother pecan brittle for the Hallmark holiday, only to find she’s allergic to nuts. Sure, it’s the thought that counts, but oh my god with the drama. Director Zhang Xiao has found the key to universality here by literally throwing in every possible upset he can find. In fact. no matter what family crisis you’ve ever experienced, it’s probably in here.
As such, the plot isn’t so much a straight line as a series of happenings around mother Qin Meili (Yan Ni) and daughter Zhao Xiaoyi (Zou Yuanqing). While Zhao Xiaoyi dreams of going to an artistic college and pursuing a dancing/acting career, Qin Meili keeps her in arrested development, fearing that she will turn out like her estranged painter father.
Director Zhang Xiao packs the contents of a year’s worth of soap episodes into a feature film. It’s almost as if a team of writers were each given a Post-it note and asked to write a dramatic scenario. Then all of them were used. Sometimes in the same scene. In rapid succession, there’s a pregnancy fear, a death in the family, a school scandal, and a property scam – and that’s only about 20 minutes of screen time. Characters literally run in from off camera to deliver bad news. It’s about two shades north of The Days of Our Lives.
The film’s chaotic plotting is mirrored in the potpourri of styles. Animated cutaways and interstitials are used early in the film to introduce new characters. A particularly effective use of this is Zhao Xiaoyi’s mini-romance subplot with a fellow teen. An anime style piece plays over her lovelorn pining, but like the boy himself, any interest in the animated motif is dropped by the time we reach the next micro-crisis.
The saving grace is the adult cast. The recognisable Yan Ni, from TV’s My Own Swordsman to Monster Hunt, plays Qin Meili with a certain amount of acerbic grace. The two men in her life, played by Wu Ruofu and David Wu, throw themselves at her like seagulls squabbling over a chip. Yet they also give some kind of ‘realistic’ counterpoint to the leads, something that is sorely needed later in the plot.
As the film reaches its chaotic third act, if you can even say this has a second act, crises are just being thrown at the characters with no discernible thematic thread. Qin Meili’s last-minute decision to open a shop, a hitherto unmentioned desire, serves only to set-up a downward spiral that brings mother and daughter back together for a final dance sequence. Instead of resolution there’s a flashback montage of the entire film, a miniature promo for the film inside a narrative that might just be a feature-length trailer for another unfinished movie.
2018 | China | DIRECTOR: Zhang Xiao | CAST: Yan Ni, Zou Yuanqing, Wu Ruofu, David Wu | DISTRIBUTOR: Tangren Cultural Film Group/ChopFlix (AUS) | RUNNING TIME: 111 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 10 May 2018 (AUS)
