KEEP COOL
A Film Review by Brian Takeshita
Rating: *1/2 out of ****
KEEP COOL, a Chinese film directed by semi-accomplished filmmaker Yimou Zhang, was one of the kickoff films for this year's Hawaii International Film Festival. On the day it premiered, lines of eager moviegoers stretched around the block, some anticipants having queued up well in advance to get a good seat in the theater. They need not have wasted their time.
The movie is billed as a comedy, but is surprisingly bereft of humor. There are noticeable attempts at laughs, but very few tries actually click. I wondered if there were jokes that I wasn't getting because I'm not from China, but unfortunately my conclusion was that this lack of humor couldn't be attributed to the cultural barrier either. KEEP COOL just isn't very funny.
The prelude to the film was a visit by KEEP COOL's producer who, with the help of an interpreter, regaled us of how in order to get the print to the festival in time, an assistant hand carried it on the plane from China to Hawaii. Although the print made it, the assistant's luggage was lost. Too bad that story wasn't in the movie, because it got a big laugh. Qu Ying, the film's female lead, was also on hand to give a few comments. However, whereas the producer politely made regular pauses in his dialog so the interpreter could bring us up to speed, Ms. Ying saw fit to say everything she had to say in one, fast-paced, incredibly long tirade. It was dizzying; good foreshadowing for the film.
You see, KEEP COOL is filmed almost totally with a camera handheld by a man with a bad case of the shakes. At least that's the way it seems, since the camera is constantly moving. Cinema verite is one thing, but panning and shaking around until your audience has a headache is another. Although some might consider it a form which helps give the viewer an idea of the anarchic state into which Chinese youth is slowly growing, I found it thoroughly distracting, and after a while, quite annoying. Headache, as I said.
The film is about a young bookseller (Wen Jiang) who is after a young woman (Qu Ying). They used to be romantically involved, but the woman grew tired of him and left the relationship. The first half of the film is about the young man's plan to win her back. Of course the thing is, she doesn't want to be won back, and has a nightclub owner friend of hers rough him up a bit. In the fight, the young man grabs a laptop computer belonging to a bystander and attempts to use it to fend off his attacker, but only ends up smashing it against a lamppost. We later find out that the laptop belongs to an older man who wishes to get his damaged computer replaced. There is a funny scene (the only one in the film) where the young man tries to use some twisted logic in order to get the older man to seek out the nightclub owner (Baotian Li) in order to recoup his losses.
There is no sense to be made out of the young woman's behavior; cold one minute, caring the next, so we feel no sympathy for her character. The bookseller would be better off without her. Although the second half of the film causes us to lose a lot of sympathy for the young bookseller as well, who is obsessed with chopping off the nightclub owner's hand as revenge for the beating he took, it also offers us some nice interaction between the bookseller and the older man. While the bookseller is blinded by his thirst for revenge, the older man is the voice of reason and tries to rationalize each situation. His quest to end the dispute peacefully and equitably is the one we identify with, but it is frustrating to see that he seems to be talking to a brick wall half the time. A friendship develops between the two men, but it occurs too late in the film for the audience to appreciate.
Although only an hour and a half in length, KEEP COOL contains extraneous material. The whole plot of how the bookseller is after the young woman could have been taken out, since we don't see her from the midpoint on. A case of mistaken identity or some other device could have served as the point of conflict between the bookseller and the nightclub owner, and would have saved us from the bookseller's boring pursuit during the first half. But of course, this would have shortened the movie to less than an hour.
There are a few things that KEEP COOL does right. As mentioned before, the interaction between the bookseller and the older man is generally pretty good. Although it grows tiresome, the reasoning with the unreasonable is a nice exercise in logic, and represents the differences in thinking between generations. In one scene, for example, the bookseller quotes Confucius to get his point across, but the older man claims the quote was misinterpreted, and that it means something entirely different. Also effective is the way Zhang sets up tension within a scene, such as when the bookseller is getting ready to cut off the hand of the unwitting nightclub owner. The nightclub owner is counting out money, slapping each bundle of currency on the table. With every shot of his hand, we can hardly stand the interminable wait before the bookseller is going to pull out his cleaver and exact his revenge. Unfortunately, these crumbs are not enough to overcome the rest of the film's shortcomings, and weren't enough to prevent that headache from lingering after I left the theater.
Review posted November 17, 1997
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