With Personal Tailor, Feng Xiaogang makes a triumphant return to the hesuipian genre, that is to say, the “end of year comedy,” with which he first achieved fame as the king of Chinese popular cinema. And he is working again with the “damned” writer, Wang Shuo, who wrote the screenplays of some of his most successful social satires with him. The set-up of the film brings to mind Three T Company, a 90s film that told the story of the bumbling attempts by three young problem-solving consultants. In Personal Tailor the professional aims of the company headed by the ever-present Ge You – the alter ego of the director – are more ambitious this time, because they not only aim to solve problems, but also to make their clients’ dreams come true. And what dreams! The film is divided up into four episodes, which represent the most emblematic idiosyncrasies of modern Chinese society. After a prologue in which a rich, bored woman hires the quartet of consultants to pep up her life by turning her into a Communist partisan during the war – and where the iconography of the period is purposely used in an inopportune manner – the film segues into the first episode, a corruption fantasy. A chauffeur who works for the party and who has seen the party officials become prey, one by one, to corruption and falling foul of the law, wants to prove to himself that, if he were in the same situation, he would be able to resist temptation…
It is a hilarious episode, played to perfection by the comic Fan Wei, who gets down to a tee the slightest details of movement and expression of the leaders of the party. The story concludes with a politically incorrect but practical (like the Chinese themselves) moral: the leader who is incorruptible is also inefficient.
The second episode strikes close to the director’s heart: the film industry. The dream that needs to become reality this time is that of a director of bad taste commercial films: he wants to learn how to stop being vulgar.
And he thinks that to do this auteur films need to be incomprehensible or bad, to which Ge You replies that Chinese films, even when they are bad, are never art-house… In any case, the team gets on the case immediately to make the client’s dream come true, laying down Dogma rules to avoid vulgarity. But the director can’t take it, he falls ill and to cure him they take him to a karaoke bar! In the end, they decide he needs a blood transfer, with the donor being a farmer who never goes to the cinema…
The third episode embodies the collective dream of those who have been left behind by modernization: to become rich. Nouveau rich, to be precise… A woman who works on the ferries is crowned as Queen Elizabeth and challenged to spend as much money in a day as a billionaire would. The moral? Even the rich have money problems (i.e. they cannot spend as much as they would like or they have to pay the interest on their investments…)! So, all in all, is the chance of being happy the same for the rich and the poor alike?
The final episode changes gear and becomes serious: it is about forgiveness, social harmony and the protection of the environment and natural resources.
And it concludes with an invitation to be giving during end-of-year celebrations, but it also contains a bitter reflection on the weakness of human nature.
In the last few years, Feng Xiaogang has abandoned the light tone that distinguished his early films, preferring to tackle painful issues that examine the roots of his country’s recent history. In this film, too, despite the narrative and style being unmistakably satirical, the director’s intention to make us reflect on situations that are no laughing matter shines through.
Maria Barbieri