Pop-poetic, super-saturated, jazzed-up cinema is a rarity for mainland China, so Xiao Jiang’s PK.COM.CN pretty much has the field to itself. For a Chinese youth audience used to looking to Hong Kong, Japanese, or especially Korean youth culture for its up-to-the-minute pop diet, films like PK are especially exciting. Finally, this is not, for young audiences, the government-sponsored message cinema of their grandfathers, nor the rarified art cinema of their fathers. This is someone from their own culture, trying to address them on their own terms. Young female director Xiao Jiang has spun a confection saturated with dazzle and pop, sprinkled with pop music, animation, MTV montage, hyper-edited dance sequences, and a commercial youth vibe that just might find a market at home. To give too much away of the plot would spoil some of the movie’s fun, so I’ll be careful here. The main story concerns three inseparable companions at a university medical school in China’s northeast (the seaside city of Dalian). Up and coming HK pop idol Jaycee Chan (Jackie Chan’s son, and the resemblance is striking) plays Zhang Wenli, a young, nerdy, rather shy and unconfident medical student and amateur graphic artist. He spends all his time with bosom buddy Ji Yinchuan, who is everything Wenli is not: ultra-confident, aggressively ambitious, and swaggeringly handsome (as indeed is the Taiwanese acting star Chen Bolin who incarnates Yinchuan a delicious and seductive swagger). Wu Yufei (played by delightful newcomer Niu Mengmeng) is the perky, suavely hip woman who makes up this trio. Yinchuan woos her in a way that the repressed Wenli can only admire; but she seems to have eyes for both of the guys. Wenli’s home life is crazed: his monomaniacal surgeon mom (Li Qinqin) and antiseptic-obsessed nurse dad (Law Kar-ying) create a prison of expectations, setting him up with a fiancée from hell (Jiao Jiao) who assigns him a GPS phone to monitor his every move. Wenli’s escape into his imagination and dreams, and the lessons that Yinchuan and Yufei can teach him about releasing his imaginative energies, form the core of this coming of age romance. Director Xiao Jiang has pumped up the visual quotient in every way possible, reminiscent of only a very few recent Chinese films, such as Li Shaohong’s Baober in Love (FEFF 2004) or Susie Au’s Mingming (2006, HK PRC co-production). There is a profusion of very catch pop, including a priceless parody of the soulfully crooning singer-songwriter guitar ballads that Yichuan and Wenli try to come up with to woo their mutual beloved. Visuals and colours are pumped up to maximum volume: the film’s notable art direction pushes the entire story into a pleasantly disorienting surreal-ville, with projections, distorted spaces, animated inserts, peppery montages, and even a soulful polar bear who decorates the movie’s margins. Credit for this sumptuous visual potpourri goes to cinematographer Zhang Li and art director Simon So. The whole is given bounce and a palpably juicy vibe by ace soundman Zhang Yang, who is responsible for much of the film’s music as well. With this much energy and visual invention, and a skillful deployment of young rising stars, PK augurs well for the future of Chinese homegrown pop cinema with real youth appeal.
Shelly Kraicer