Summary
China’s remake of the South Korean rom com The Plan Man is an endearingly stylish musical romp that is a good way to start the year.
Chinese comedy musicals aren’t your typical international fare. WARM HUG (温暖的抱抱), from director and star Yuan Chang, is a bit of a hybrid film. It combines the musical format with big quirky comedic brushstrokes of a New Year film.
Bao Bao (Yuan Chang) was a boy with OCD raised by parents with equally extreme tendencies. As an adult, he works as a piano teacher but keeps people at a distance through obsessive cleaning, planning and scheduling. When he meets an aspiring but messy singer-songwriter Song Wen Nuan (Li Qin), she draws him into an original song competition and his life is thrown into chaos.
After almost a year of physical distancing in the real world, a little bit of order sounds like a lovely idea. Indeed, as mandatory mask-wearing and regular sanitising is happening across large parts of the world, this film has (perhaps consciously) tapped into the zeitgeist. In fact, it’s thematically reminiscent of Taiwan’s IWeirdo, albeit with more of an emphasis on musical comedy than personality disorders.
As you might imagine, much of the film concerns their extreme personalities rubbing off on each other. The title derives from Bao Bao’s issues around having never been hugged by anyone. So, while it’s not exactly a tender exploration of mental health, it’s at least a unique spin on the odd couple formula that has served cinema well since they first crawled out of the rom com cave.
WARM HUG is also a visually pleasing film, with lots of carefully constructed accidentally-Wes-Anderson knolling montages. Bao Bao’s clean, almost monochromatic world is crisp from the opening scenes. What is most surprising is how dramatically it bursts into full-on musical set-pieces at various points, and the colour contrast is spectacular. There’s one recurring sequence on a gorgeous idyllic rooftop, a kind of care facility for the disaffected.
Yuan Chang never fully embraces this style though. Once the musical element has been established, it is forgotten for long stretches at a time. It swings stylistically from semi-dark humour to at least one literally explosive fart joke. Aside from a great opening number, and a similarly catchy piece as the credits roll, the rest of the music is a little vanilla.
Still, the leads – an assembly of China’s popular comedians – are likeable and do most of the heavy lifting. Yuan Chang plays something close to the straight man in this comedy duo. Li Qin, known most recently for her TV roles in The Wolf and Dear Military Uniform, is a kind of manic dream girl but charming and exuberant in the role. While his version of OCD may be extreme, and played for laughs, it never feels malicious.
Qiao Shan (The Knight of Shadows: Between Yin and Yang) plays an affable rival, adding something other than the core relationship and the music contest to the mix. Other notable actors fill out the neighbours and fellow competitors.
There’s no surprises narratively, even though it differs significantly from the original South Korean version this is based on, but after a long dark year of constant shifts this formulaic romance might just be the most pleasant way to start 2021. As China continues its love affair with imported musicals, perhaps we’ll begin to see more light hearted fare like this.
2020 | China | DIRECTOR: Chang Yuan | WRITER: Chang Yuan, Wang Zhijun, Xuyang Leng | CAST: Yuan Chang, Li Qin, Qiao Shan | DISTRIBUTOR: China Lion (AUS) | RUNNING TIME: 112 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 7 January 2021 (AUS)
