Neil Young's Film Lounge

BIG SHOT’S FUNERAL

5/10

China/Hong Kong/USA 2002 : Feng Xiaogang : 100 mins

Daft but intermittently amusing US-Chinese co-production featuring what may be the most unlikely set-up for a comedy since Being John Malkovich. In Beijing to remake (!) The Last Emperor, legendary American director Don Tyler (Donald Sutherland) suffers a stroke. As he slips into a coma, he mumbles his ‘last request’ to cameraman Yo Yo (Ge You): he’s wants a full-blown Chinese-style ‘comedy funeral’ in the Forbidden City. As Don lies in hospital, watched over by his assistant Lucy (Rosamund Kwan) and his producer Tony (Paul Mazursky) Yo Yo sets about fulfilling his wishes with unbridled entrepreneurial zeal. Before long, Yo Yo and his equally ambitious pal King (Ying Da), are selling advertising rights to what they envisage as a massive international media event. But then Don wakes up.

As a broad-brush media satire, Big Shot’s Funeral isn’t especially sharp, coherent or surprising, but it’s streets ahead of, say, David Mamet’s State and Main, in the most basic terms of number of laughs and having its heart in the right place. The real target of the humour, however, is China’s newly-unleashed sense of entrepreneurship – a little bit rich, as the co-production deal behind the movie is, itself, a direct result of the economic revolution.

Feng Xiaogang’s bland direction, meanwhile owes much more to (bad) western traditions than any of the fascinating recent products of his country’s renascent underground film industry. There’s nothing going on in terms of fancy visuals, and the actors seem to have been left to their own devices, with mixed results: Sutherland seems much more relaxed than usual and looks after himself OK, but Mazursky and Kwan aren’t so lucky. It’s just as well the sprightly Ge You and Ying Da are on hand to maintain the energy levels – You, in particular, nails every laugh in expert fashion.

There’s one peak of comic absurdity which is worth the price of admission on its own – a cheap-looking but hilarious animated mock-up of a film that’s to be shown at the funeral, featuring Sutherland flying through space to heaven and being reborn as a Chinese baby. Perhaps inevitably, it’s all rather anti-climactic after this irresistible excursion into inspired loopiness – but even so, there’s no excuse for the plot so totally falling to pieces in the final half-hour, petering out into incomprehensibility as the bilingual credits roll.