Punch Drunk
Jia Ling follows up her smash hit debut ‘Hi, Mom’ with some aggressively mixed messaging.
YOLO
Director: Jia Ling • Writers: Sun Jibin, Liu Honglu, Jia Ling, Guo Yupeng, Bu Yu, based on the screenplay by Shin Adachi
Starring: Jia Ling, Lei Jiayin, Zhang Xiaofei, Zhao Haiyan, Yang Zi
China • 2hrs 10mins
Opens Hong Kong March 21 • IIA
Grade: B-
The skeleton of actor-director Jia Ling’s YOLO | 熱辣滾燙 is right there for anyone to see. The film is based on Masaharu Take’s 2014 100 Yen Love, starring Sakura Ando (who could read the phone book and make it cool), and is a relatively note-for-note rehash of the original. Just not as affecting, and now loaded with the kind of mixed messages that drive feminists and… checks notes… anyone with an appreciation of a well-placed middle finger ’round the bend. The story centres on an under-achieving thirtysomething who discovers boxing as a route to a sense of pride and, more crucially, agency. Ando played Ichiko, a depressed, barely communicative woman with fraught family relationships, whose growth we see unfold in desaturated, almost documentarian images. Ichiko was a bit of a bitch, too, and watching her transform into a functioning person was the modest joy of the film.
So, needless to say, the sunny, chipper, Technicolor pictures of Jia’s remake immediately signal a much different route. YOLO, which racked in nearly US$500 million at the Chinese box office earlier in the year (though that’s half the business Jia’s first massive hit, Hi, Mom, did) strips the story of its psychological and emotional undercurrents for more melodrama, more comedy, and more messages about how you too can drop 50kg through boxing and become a svelte and marriageable woman. Um. Right.
From duckling to swan
Much as we did with Ichiko, we meet Du Leying (Jia) at the end of her journey, as she’s walking the corridor to the ring for her first bout. Then we learn about her life as a fat slob, lounging on the sofa all day eating junk food and not working. She may have a depression problem too, but that’s never made clear. What she definitely has is a bitchy sister, Ledan (Zhang Xiaofei, The Last Suspect), who’s freshly divorced and wants Leying to sign over the flat their grandmother left to her, so her kid can go to a better school. She also has a cheating boyfriend – who’s cheating with her BFF – and an ambitious cousin, Dou Dou (Yang Zi), who works for a game-reality show that gets losers jobs or some shit. After a knock-down fight with Ledan, Leying moves out and makes a go of independence.
But wait, there’s more. That independence requires she get a job, which she does at a BBQ restaurant, where the pervy manager (Xu Juncong) regularly hits on her. Because harassment is HI-larious. Eventually the gym down the street and the boxing coach she sees through the window, Hao Kun (Lei Jiayin, Under the Light) get her attention. The tepid romance Leying and Kun get into fizzles out after he blows his last stab at boxing greatness – but Leying gets serious about the sport. A good 90 minutes in, I might add. More than empowering her, we’re reminded that Leying’s lost 50kg and looks terrific in a slinky gown (in the credits). What the unholy fuck?
YOLO supposedly took a year to shoot because Jia lost 50kg in real time, mirroring the character’s march to beauty queen status. Strangely, the outtakes over the credits – which also garishly detail her weight movements day-by-day – have more inherent drama in them than the actual film does. Jia’s performance of mousey is mostly unintelligible, and never really gives Leying personality or motivations that we can get behind. and her Film Administration-approved struggles are fairly weak tea: Ichiko is straight up raped in 100 Yen Love; Leying has to deal with a dude who demands she stay late and have a drink. Now, I’m not quantifying unwanted attention, but YOLO’s swap-out suggests rape is not an issue in China. It is. The gratuitous apartment fight, the philandering boyfriend and the reality show double cross are just that – gratuitous – and so Leying is never given an opportunity to grow for herself with all these other distractions.
YOLO isn’t all bad. A dinner with her dad (Zhang Qi) in the middle of Leying’s transformation has a naturalistic father-daughter dynamic that telegraphs his pride in her newfound athleticism – and not for the way it makes her look. The final boxing match (which follows a training montage set to Bill Conti’s iconic Rocky theme, if you didn’t get it) is legit compelling, helped along by actual fighter Zhang Guilin, and for a brief moment YOLO rises above itself. Leying gets hit, gets up, gets hit, gets up, and we see that glimmer of determination to finish three rounds, even if it’s just so she can say she did it. It’s the single sequence in Michael Liu’s photography that’s not sunny and candy-coated, and hints at deeper themes. But there’s a tension between Jia’s comic instincts and the more introspective subject matter; they never sit well together. Then we get the credits and the final shot of Jia in her flowing dress, lean Angelina Jolie leg sticking out. Way to muddle a message. — DEK