The most eagerly awaited film of the year in China, Crazy Racer is a film which can be discussed from several angles. For a start, the plot is extremely complicated, with three or four narrative threads which overlap in various moments, but there is a message that is fundamentally simple: obsession with money is ruining the world, but in the end, justice triumphs. In the middle of all this is the protagonist Geng Hao, a cycling champion, who tests positive in a drugs test and is forced to pull out of a race. He accuses his sponsor Li Fafa of giving him a drink with banned substances in, and when his trainer dies, he uses this for leverage and insists that Li pay for the funeral. He ends up working as a bike messenger and unexpected finds himself embroiled in a network of criminals made up of grotesque characters, professional killers, Thai drug dealers, Taiwanese gangsters, inept policemen and even a funeral parlor employee.
All this is told in a frenetic style, with a breathtakingly quick rhythm and almost acrobatic camera movements, but there are some light moments of genuine comedy. Before Ning Hao took to it, the black comedy had already made other appearance as a genre in Chinese cinema, notably Huang Jianxing’s films (Black Cannon Incident, Gimme Kudos, etc…), but Ning is the one credited for making it the genre which best represents the spirit of contemporary China. While this film has several qualities in common with Crazy Stone, the director’s preceding film - the same spirit, several actors and a similar name - Crazy Racer is not a sequel. It has been compared to Guy Richie’s films, and imitated by many young Chinese auteurs, who see it almost as a recipe for a critically acclaimed and commercially successful film. Crazy Racer has not disappointed the critics - who see it as another classic black comedy that confirms the director’s genius - or its backers, who put up the 10 million RMB to make what is thought by some to be the best comedy produced in China, and made over 100 million RMB.
As a metaphor, the film embodies the spirit and, it can even be said, the story of modern China: a country which is making a mad dash towards economic development, during which it stumbles and gets confused, but eventually recovers and overcomes these glitches. The face of Huang Bo, who plays the protagonist, is like a mask. His exaggerated laughs - somewhere between innocent and coarse and so reminiscent of paintings from the Chinese pop art movement which is so popular right now - almost seems like the epitome of the unshakeable spirit of faith in the future which permeated China during the Olympics.
Maria Barbieri