CJ7
Directed by Stephen Chow
In a healthy film culture, critics would celebrate Stephen Chow the way they do P.T. Anderson, Todd Haynes or Sofia Coppola. I take that back, Chow doesn’t require you to lower your intelligence; he raises it. Chow’s new movie CJ7 confirms that he deserves the recognition once given great movie artists like Griffith, Chaplin, Keaton, Welles, Renoir, Lang, Borzage and Rene Clair—filmmakers who were populists, not elitists. They knew that cinematic ingenuity must be related to feeling. In CJ7, Chow continues this tradition, writing, directing and starring in an allegory about the value of movies. His coup? Using the story of a poor Chinese boy, Dicky (Xu Jiao), who develops an imaginative relationship with a toy.
To think CJ7 is a children’s movie would be a gross mistake, refusing to accept the beauty of Chow’s observations on culture, society and longing. The virtues we learn from biblical parables, fairy tales or great movies aren’t just for children; they set out the conditions we live under, and that explains the simplicity of Chow’s premise. Elements of sci-fi fantasy that come through when Dicky’s construction worker father gives the motherless boy an orb (that has popped out of a vehicle from outer space) should not limit how this story is read.
The first image is Chow as Dicky’s father, cobbling a pair of discarded shoes for his son; the film then cuts to a shot of a Rolls Royce unloading affluent students. At school, Dicky arrives late in tattered, dirty clothes like Pigpen in Charles Schultz’s Peanuts. He’s reprimanded by a class-conscious teacher and then ridiculed by immaculately uniformed classmates who boast about a brand new toys (a CJ1 robot-dog) and taunt the not-cool kids. Chow throws his next curve in a classroom vocation drill where the kids announce their ambitions: “I want to be a superstar.” “I want to be an entrepreneur.” “I want to be Nicole Kidman.” And the status-mad teacher responds: “Why not?”
Dicky’s school could be called American Idol, Vanity Fair or MTV. Chow satirizes the degraded cultural values with which upcoming generations are indoctrinated. But Dicky’s ambition is what sharpens Chow’s point: “I want to be a poor person,” he says, quoting his father’s advice that humility and compassion are wealth. Such thinking makes Dicky an outsider, yet Chow sees the smudge-faced kid as heroic, especially in a society that prizes surface cleanliness as being next to capitalism.
Chow’s thesis is more profound than There Will Be Blood's, and it’s expressed through a more sophisticated narrative. Dicky’s innocent apostasy radically critiques China’s new prosperity, focusing on the affection between Dicky and his widower father (they engage in acrobatic roach-smashing in their hovel.) Then Chow’s outer-space toy symbolism enlarges the family theme. The CJ7 toy—a superior version of the manufactured product flaunted by the school’s bully—metamorphoses into a doppelganger of Dicky’s unarticulated affections. The bouncing orb becomes a pet, a fuzzy-wuzzy embodiment of Dicky’s pique, humor, irascibility and spunk. This CJ7 toy-pet demonstrates cinema’s ability to personify and idealize experience while Chow’s plot works out Dicky’s schoolyard dilemmas and the father’s fascination with kind, pretty Miss Yuen (Kitty Zhang); but CJ7’s fate is to instruct Dicky on the depth of his filial relationship and to encourage his maturity.
If that sounds suspiciously close to E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Chow’s ahead of you. CJ7 is an unabashed tribute to Spielberg’s classic. Chow returns to the annus mirabilis of 1982, the year of E.T. and Michael Jackson’s Thriller (preeminent global art events for the following decades) to find the common emotion, the populist richness, that movie culture has recently lost. Fools who overlook Chow’s personal conviction will think CJ7 is a mere imitation or a misconceived departure from his martial arts film Shaolin Soccer. But Chow’s underrated status comes from precisely such pigeonholing. Two years ago his Kung Fu Hustle was a spectacular combination of social critique and ecstatic spiritual vision—a pop epic meant to unite the cult audience and the mass audience. Yet American moviegoers slept on it—as they also ignored Chen Kaige’s The Promise and Zhang Zimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower.
No recent American action movie has been as astonishing as those Chinese masterworks, but it’s not just a lack of craft; most recent American movies deny morality and benevolence as animation-fodder, kid stuff. The coarsened emotion and craft of The Bourne Ultimatum or There Will Be Blood prevents the deep sentiment that Chow elicits. His most empathetic f/x is Dicky, a wily, charming boy-child performance that is actually played by a young girl. Xu Jiao’s extraordinary feat is in the great tradition of Disney’s Pinocchio being voiced by a female. This jest looks back on E.T. and winks.
American film culture has entered its foulest period ever but CJ7 should be a great antidote. Dicky rejuvenates his toy through faith and Chow’s story—an analysis of what reenergizes hope—is preferable to fashionable movies about killing. Ironically, audiences aren’t rushing to those movies either. What they’re missing is abundant in CJ7; its final sequence, scored to a disco version of the 1960s hit “Sunny,” is a series of plot-closures that is graceful, buoyant and—rare these days—satisfying.
Directed by Stephen Chow
In a healthy film culture, critics would celebrate Stephen Chow the way they do P.T. Anderson, Todd Haynes or Sofia Coppola. I take that back, Chow doesn’t require you to lower your intelligence; he raises it. Chow’s new movie CJ7 confirms that he deserves the recognition once given great movie artists like Griffith, Chaplin, Keaton, Welles, Renoir, Lang, Borzage and Rene Clair—filmmakers who were populists, not elitists. They knew that cinematic ingenuity must be related to feeling. In CJ7, Chow continues this tradition, writing, directing and starring in an allegory about the value of movies. His coup? Using the story of a poor Chinese boy, Dicky (Xu Jiao), who develops an imaginative relationship with a toy.
To think CJ7 is a children’s movie would be a gross mistake, refusing to accept the beauty of Chow’s observations on culture, society and longing. The virtues we learn from biblical parables, fairy tales or great movies aren’t just for children; they set out the conditions we live under, and that explains the simplicity of Chow’s premise. Elements of sci-fi fantasy that come through when Dicky’s construction worker father gives the motherless boy an orb (that has popped out of a vehicle from outer space) should not limit how this story is read.
The first image is Chow as Dicky’s father, cobbling a pair of discarded shoes for his son; the film then cuts to a shot of a Rolls Royce unloading affluent students. At school, Dicky arrives late in tattered, dirty clothes like Pigpen in Charles Schultz’s Peanuts. He’s reprimanded by a class-conscious teacher and then ridiculed by immaculately uniformed classmates who boast about a brand new toys (a CJ1 robot-dog) and taunt the not-cool kids. Chow throws his next curve in a classroom vocation drill where the kids announce their ambitions: “I want to be a superstar.” “I want to be an entrepreneur.” “I want to be Nicole Kidman.” And the status-mad teacher responds: “Why not?”
Dicky’s school could be called American Idol, Vanity Fair or MTV. Chow satirizes the degraded cultural values with which upcoming generations are indoctrinated. But Dicky’s ambition is what sharpens Chow’s point: “I want to be a poor person,” he says, quoting his father’s advice that humility and compassion are wealth. Such thinking makes Dicky an outsider, yet Chow sees the smudge-faced kid as heroic, especially in a society that prizes surface cleanliness as being next to capitalism.
Chow’s thesis is more profound than There Will Be Blood's, and it’s expressed through a more sophisticated narrative. Dicky’s innocent apostasy radically critiques China’s new prosperity, focusing on the affection between Dicky and his widower father (they engage in acrobatic roach-smashing in their hovel.) Then Chow’s outer-space toy symbolism enlarges the family theme. The CJ7 toy—a superior version of the manufactured product flaunted by the school’s bully—metamorphoses into a doppelganger of Dicky’s unarticulated affections. The bouncing orb becomes a pet, a fuzzy-wuzzy embodiment of Dicky’s pique, humor, irascibility and spunk. This CJ7 toy-pet demonstrates cinema’s ability to personify and idealize experience while Chow’s plot works out Dicky’s schoolyard dilemmas and the father’s fascination with kind, pretty Miss Yuen (Kitty Zhang); but CJ7’s fate is to instruct Dicky on the depth of his filial relationship and to encourage his maturity.
If that sounds suspiciously close to E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Chow’s ahead of you. CJ7 is an unabashed tribute to Spielberg’s classic. Chow returns to the annus mirabilis of 1982, the year of E.T. and Michael Jackson’s Thriller (preeminent global art events for the following decades) to find the common emotion, the populist richness, that movie culture has recently lost. Fools who overlook Chow’s personal conviction will think CJ7 is a mere imitation or a misconceived departure from his martial arts film Shaolin Soccer. But Chow’s underrated status comes from precisely such pigeonholing. Two years ago his Kung Fu Hustle was a spectacular combination of social critique and ecstatic spiritual vision—a pop epic meant to unite the cult audience and the mass audience. Yet American moviegoers slept on it—as they also ignored Chen Kaige’s The Promise and Zhang Zimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower.
No recent American action movie has been as astonishing as those Chinese masterworks, but it’s not just a lack of craft; most recent American movies deny morality and benevolence as animation-fodder, kid stuff. The coarsened emotion and craft of The Bourne Ultimatum or There Will Be Blood prevents the deep sentiment that Chow elicits. His most empathetic f/x is Dicky, a wily, charming boy-child performance that is actually played by a young girl. Xu Jiao’s extraordinary feat is in the great tradition of Disney’s Pinocchio being voiced by a female. This jest looks back on E.T. and winks.
American film culture has entered its foulest period ever but CJ7 should be a great antidote. Dicky rejuvenates his toy through faith and Chow’s story—an analysis of what reenergizes hope—is preferable to fashionable movies about killing. Ironically, audiences aren’t rushing to those movies either. What they’re missing is abundant in CJ7; its final sequence, scored to a disco version of the 1960s hit “Sunny,” is a series of plot-closures that is graceful, buoyant and—rare these days—satisfying.
