Your Point?
Capa Xin’s latest thriller is a topical buffet: There’s a little of everything but no cohesive meal.
Trending Topic
Director: Capa Xin • Writers: Yang Weiwei, Ye Qin
Starring: Zhou Dongyu, Song Yang, Yuan Hong, Wang Hao, Tao Hai, Zhang Yuwen
China • 2hrs 1min
Opens Hong Kong December 14 • IIA
Grade: C+
What it is exactly Chen Miao (the hardest working woman in Chinese cinema, Zhou Dongyu, Under the Light, Better Days) does for a living in Trending Topic | 熱搜 is unclear, and why it’s up to her to get justice for a young rape victim – sorry, “bullying” – is anyone’s guess. Set in the glamorous, high-stakes world of… lifestyle blogging? News blogging? Aggregate headline generating? I ain’t got a clue, but set in this glamorous world, Chen is an ultra-clever… journalist? Editor? Moral arbiter? I ain’t got a clue, but this is what she is. A very fashionable one. We meet Chen picking up her bumpkin mother in her Tesla (the new movie shorthand for “asshole”), just before she runs off to put out a fire at the office. A sensational story about “bullying” Chen made into a viral phenomenon on her site, Miao’s Whimsy, is backfiring. One of the story’s subjects has attempted suicide, and the blowback has Chen, her publishing/uploading partner He Yan (Song Yang, Wrath of Silence) and their crew doing damage control over their part in the initial story. So far so 21st century media. But when Miao’s Whimsy’s major investor gets involved, it unearths a much larger conspiracy of silence, sexual assault, and your garden variety rich guys dodging the law.
Not sure what her job is
What exactly Trending Topic is trying to say is trying to say is also curious. It points plenty of preachy fingers – at internet users, writers, CEOs, healthcare – without ever really making a substantial statement. It’s not non-judgemental. It’s just mealy-mouthed. When the film begins, Chen is a Stone Bitch – look at that bright red lipstick – concerned purely with topping the single trending story list everyone in Beijing and beyond reads. No seriously, we get to see one interface so my assumption is one outlet. After the bullying story blows up, the attempted suicide by 18-year-old Xiaosui (Zhang Yuwen) demands a pivot, and Chen orchestrates the next stage of the narrative. She also needs it to go away because she’s about to demand more funding from the site’s primary investor, a hospitality conglomerate embodied by Yue Peng (Yuan Hong, Fire on the Plain), practically twirling a moustache. But here’s the thing: the hotel group also owns the hotel industry vocational school Xiaosui attended. Something is clearly hinky, and a plea for help from Xiaosui moves Chen to action. Unfortunately He wants the cash infusion and the comfortable life for his family, and they go their separate ways.
From here director Capa Xin Yukun (Deep in the Heart) goes hard on the trappings of the legal/journalism thriller, pitting the two editors against each other in escalating court of public opinion warfare until finally Chen is humiliated, and accountability for a rapist nearly slips away (this is a Chinese film. Police will be summoned). There’s damning last minute evidence, players switching sides in favour of justice, threats by hot shit bizniz dudes, and some of the most ridiculous scheming of the year.
This is essentially She Said for China, and the latest in a string of flashy, big budget “topical” thrillers that consistently take last minute turns for the narratively ridiculous and legally fantastical. See: Last Suspect and No More Bets. This time around an engineer of China’s intensely online public discourse gets to play crusader while imparting moral lessons – ones she herself learns – while never having to identify as a pesky journalist. That may seem straight forward enough but Xin and co-writers Yang Weiwei and Ye Qin load up on mixed messages that soften any bite they may have been trying to take out of a complex subject. There is genuine contempt for WeChat users in here. Trending Topic never gets around to interrogating the most interesting, and meaningful, questions it dances around: How do we prevent power and influence, in a monetised media space where funders are crucial, from manipulating the content? Who’s going to police an editor’s desperate drive for clicks and comments? Where does culpability end? How do we navigate the sometimes vicious tunnel vision of anonymous commenting? When does that anonymity need to be guaranteed? This is valid stuff, but Xin instead opts to play it safe (duh) and lean into Hollywood’s worst conventional instincts to spank a few social media users. — DEK