The Music Box (Lifashi) (Screen Daily Review)

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The Music Box (Lifashi)

Shelly Kraicer in Shanghai 14 July 2006 05:00


Dir: Chen Yifei. China. 2006. 104mins.

Lushly photographed historical romances from mainland China are not exactly in short supply in today’s film market, but The Music Box distinguishes itself with its meticulously illuminated visual polish. Yet although this tale of a hairdresser’s grand adventures, both amorous and political, is set against the turmoil of modern China’s mid-20th century, the melodrama and grand history seem awkwardly juxtaposed in such an ambitious work.

Not surprisingly, image was everything for The Music Box’s director, Chen Yifei, one of China’s most popular modern painters. His picturesque canvases of languorously posed Chinese women are among some of the most omnipresent commercial art images in the country, although he also parlayed his fame into careers as fashion consultant, publisher, modeling agent, and lifestyle entrepreneur).

The Music Box reflects his obsessions – but also sadly marks the end of his life. During a troubled shoot (the original star Jiang Wen withdrew after filming began; production was then suspended for two years) Chen passed away, aged 59. Shooting and post-production were subsequently supervised by Hong Kong producer and director Ng See-yuen (credited as ‘art executive’).

Chinese box office has yielded a surprisingly high RMB 8m during the film’s two-month run, which suggests that Chen Yifei’s posthumous fame was an effective selling point. The version screened at the Shanghai International Film Festival included a visual eulogy to Chen, with behind-the-scenes following the end credits. Western film festivals after grandly executed period exoticism without martial-arts flash may find The Music Box congenial, though its television soap-style narrative won’t help to win over demanding audiences.

Opening during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1937, the story instantly plunges popular Shanghai-based hairstylist Lu Ping (Chen Kun) into the action. When his client, singer Yu Mian (Wang Yajie), bashes the head of a Japanese soldier who is attempting to rape her in Lu’s salon, the startled baber accidentally slits the throat of the soldier’s companion he is shaving at the time.

On the run, Lu takes refuge in a lovely canal-lined village where Song (Ren Guangzhi), his master’s brother lives. Song’s beautiful daughter Jiayi (Zeng Li) is just celebrating her engagement of convenience to a high ranking Kuomintang (KMT) military commander (Liu Guanjun), but this doesn’t stop her from fixing her amorous attention on a curiously hesitant Lu.

The fugitive stumbles across Communist rebels, whose hair he cuts, and who hail him as a hero for killing the Japanese soldier. He is bombed by, then captured by, Japanese troops. When their commander demands a shave, Lu refuses, instead cutting his own hand, in his only real act of (albeit passive) resistance. Further adventures take him back to Shanghai after the Japanese defeat, where he is incongruously promoted to a series of ever higher KMT commissions before he is captured by the victorious Communists in 1949.

Aside from a schematically structured plot that lumbers through each incident via well-trodden clichés, the film’s major liabilities are its main stars. Chen Kun as Lu Ping has a wooden, all purpose doe-eyed stare that probably plays to his teen-idol fan base, but nothing more. As the beauty Jiayi, newcomer Zeng Li lacks screen presence and the visual charisma needed to support all the loving close-ups that the film offers her.

Lively performances by secondary characters (Wang Yajie’s sexy singer, Liu Guanjun’s creepily passive KMT officer) tend to overshadow the principals. Xi Qiming's cloyingly overbearing musical score (a common liability of mainstream Chinese productions) does the film no favours.

The Music Box upholds Chen Yifei’s reputation for softly focused, exquisitely lit period nostalgia, much as his first film Evening Liaisons did (in Cannes Un Certain Regard in 1995). Wang Xiaoming’s luminous widescreen photography frequently outshines the film’s stodgy material.

The curiously empty formalism of the overly melodramatic plot and Lu Ping’s odd lack of passionate interest in any of the females around him (and the uncanny intensity of his scenes with the soldiers whose heads he shaves) hints that there might be rather interesting, unarticulated undercurrents lurking beneath the film’s grandiose surface. But the film refuses to commit itself in any direction, falling in a nether region somewhere between the poles of enjoyable light camp, luscious romance, and serious history.

Production companies
Shanghai Chen Yifei Construction Environment Art
Beijing China Film Yuanshen Production

International sales
China Film Group Corp

Executive producers
Yang Buting
Chen Yifei

Producers
Han Sanping
Song Meiying

Screenplay
Fan Yiping
Chen Yifei
based on the novel by Fan Yiping

Cinematography
Wang Xiaoming

Editor
Pan Xiong

Production design
Wang Xingchang
Zhang Hui

Music
Xi Qiming

Main cast
Chen Kun
Zeng Li
Liu Guanjun
Wang Yajie
Ren Guangzhi
Bi Yuanjin
Li Lihong
Wei Zongwan

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