Sophie's Revenge

After gaining international recognition in Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,  Zhang Ziyi has gone on to make projects that consist of critically acclaimed films, box office misfires, and the occasional Hollywood blockbuster, turning in performances that are either truly memorable or downright forgettable. With the face of an angel and a smoldering gaze that underscores a raw sensuality, Zhang Ziyi has had relative success in roles as the femme fatale (The Banquet, House of Flying Daggers) but somehow always appeared inadequate in portraying characters which required a certain level of emotional and intellectual depth (Purple Butterfly, Forever Enthralled, Horsemen). Hers is a body of work that yields itself to mediocrity (Jasmine Women, Memoirs of a Geisha) and yet just when you're about to dismiss her as another pretty face, she'll turn around and surprise you as she did in Wong Kar-Wai's 2046.

The fact that her filmography includes movies like Rush Hour 2 and Princess Racoon only goes to show how  sought-after she's become [having worked with well-known directors], and that regardless of any shortcomings in her acting, what Zhang Ziyi  aims to accomplish is to diversify the roles that she play. 

When I was young, my mother told me a woman in love is foolish but a woman rejected is crazy...

In Sophie's Revenge, Zhang Ziyi in the titular role Sophie, is a kooky cartoonist who was unceremoniously dumped by her surgeon fiancé  Jeff (So Ji-Sub) for actress, Joanna (Fan Bing Bing). Heartbroken and humiliated, this Sophie resorts to braving the cold and clinging on to ledges just to spy on her ex. Tortured by memories and severely defeated after watching the happy couple [yes, stalking will do that to you],  Sophie ends up sulking for days until her friends (Ruby Lin and Yao Chen) intervene and tell her in no uncertain terms to start over by drowning her sorrows in work. Jumping at the chance to publish new material, Sophie decides to exact revenge and make use of her experience as the basis for her "Love Handbook". She then sets this plan in motion by formulating a step-by-step program to win back her fickle ex, implementing steps one and two of her strategy to disastrous results.

 My mother also said, men must choose the right career; and women marry the right guy. What she meant was a woman's job is to find Mr. Right.

Devastated over back-to-back failures, Sophie attends a Halloween party with her friends where she gets rather drunk and disorderly. There, she meets Gordon (Peter Ho), a photographer, whom she discovered that Joanna rejected in order to be with Jeff. In her drunken stupor, she enlists Gordon's help, believing that their combined efforts would increase the odds of orchestrating a break-up. Will Sophie finally get her revenge? Better yet, is Zhang Ziyi even up to the challenge [of doing a romantic comedy]?

Writer-director Jin Yimeng's vision of Sophie's Revenge appears to stem from a patchwork of  popular romantic comedies, drawing its main premise from the Meg Ryan movie Addicted to Love and ripping off key elements in Jean Pierre Jeunet's Amélie.  Touted as China's first contemporary romantic comedy [ergo chick flick], this joint-project from Beijing Perfect World Co. and Korea's CJ Entertainment, along with  Zhang Ziyi's financing, has a production value that could easily rival the best that any country has to offer, with a bright, candy-colored palette [think jellybeans] courtesy of cinematographer Amando Salas and state of the art computer generated effects. It's gorgeously shot with a cast that wears trendy clothes and takes pretty pictures but judging by style and content, Sophie's Revenge has nothing wholly original to offer.

As romantic comedies go, Sophie's Revenge follows a foolproof formula that's designed to delight those in search of shallow, mindless entertainment. It's chic and trendy, furthermore it makes no attempt to hide the fact that it was designed to appeal to a broader audience and should therefore exhibit a fresh, young vibe. So much so, that the film itself is devoid of any cultural identity and pays no homage to any nationality, almost as if it exists in a homogeneous society, oblivious of the long list of well-loved movies that are defined by a specific heritage and/or made more romantic because of a certain locale (i.e. My Big Fat Greek Wedding, When Harry Met Sally, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Far and Away, Joy Luck Club, etc). By existing in a vacuum, it kind of loses its heart; and by trying too hard to appear Westernized, it simply doesn't have that spark. This movie doesn't have that ability to create a niche for itself in order to tap into a person's consciousness primarily because the viewer is struck by this strong sense of déjà vu-- such that everything you see in it has already been done before, only it was done better.

It's a perfect example of a movie wherein style got the best of substance as the storyline remained wafer thin and the characters turned out to be no more than broad sketches that evoked little or no empathy. Jin Yimeng's ode to the talented and eccentric woman comes off as as an ode to the severely neurotic, with Sophie being a decade-late, pale and inferior imitation of David E. Kelley's Ally McBeal.  Equipped with a hyperactive imagination, Sophie is gawky and awkward, more so, desperate and superficial as she  doggedly subjects herself to consecutive acts of idiocy. It takes quite a long while for her to even remotely look normal and that, I'm afraid, is severely overshadowed by zany sequences and disturbing hallucinations that would earn anyone entry to the nearest mental institution. As a movie that claims to celebrate the modern  Chinese woman, its female characters seriously lack depth. They're flighty and irrational, and they seem to be used to living a life of excess.

Much of the comedy is lifted from half a dozen other films (Two Weeks Notice, My Best Friend's Wedding, America's Sweethearts to name a few) but lumped together, all the token comic sequences  turned out  unfunny and uninspired. So Ji-Sub barely registers on screen as he struggles to phonetically enunciate his Mandarin lines while the sultry Fan Bing Bing is left to make the best out of an otherwise thankless role. Peter Ho is quite decent but considering that his character is the only one that's sane doesn't make that much of an accomplishment.

You need a psychiatrist.

And what about Zhang Ziyi, you say?

Well, she stumbles, she falls, makes faces and does just about everything in her power to elicit a laugh that  I myself, am embarrassed to watch. While Audrey Tautou's Amélie was full of  childlike wonder, Zhang Ziyi's Sophie was plainly unstable, possibly even mentally deranged. She does not lend herself well to physical comedy as she does to choreographed martial arts sequences so slapstick comedy might not be the right way to demonstrate her versatility as an actress. To be blunt, the girl just  doesn't have what it takes to be funny. Her desire to expand her three expression arsenal which consists of: #1. a come hither stare; #2. a prepare to die glare; and [my personal favorite, which is a lethal combination of the previous two expressions--] #3. the black widow eye (which loosely translates to "I'm horny so you'll die later"), is a goal that fell out of reach when she decided to do a movie without any distracting sharp weapons and fancy costumes. She doesn't have the acting chops to make an unlikeable character likable because her appeal and charisma always came from playing characters who were by nature cold and inaccessible. To go against that without adequate preparation is pure hubris on her part. Here's to waiting for expression #4. 

Categories: Chinese, Movies, Reviews, Zhang Ziyi