Fridae

Like most of his cohort of directors, Feng Xiaogang started off making social satires and urban comedies – and then went on to make big budget epics. Before the much maligned The Banquet and last year’s tearjerker Aftershock, there was Big Shot’s Funeral and a host of other painfully accurate satires of modern Chinese living. You can count me in the camp that prefers the pre-commercial darling version of Feng Xiaogang and I for one am glad to see the director return to his roots with If you are the one 2.

Between a divorce that parodies a wedding ceremony and a living funeral that bookend this film, winter-spring couple Qin Fen and Xiaoxiao (Ge You and Shu Qi respectively) contemplate marriage and settle for a trial live-in period to test their love for each other. After all, he’s really old (but rich!) and she’s young enough to be his daughter (but truly likes him a lot!). Never mind the newly rich Ge You spent most of the previous film publicly searching for a suitable mate in a parody of reality dating shows and that Shu Qi appeared to be yet another one of his misadventures – this time, they mean it.

Since Feng Xiaogang is at heart a social satirist, you shouldn’t surprised that the live-in trial marriage will turn into a satire of married life. It’s a situation comedy where you will laugh along with the director’s cynical view of marriage and sexual politics.

What’s surprising about this film is the whole swathe of modern urban China that Feng manages to subtly put down while telling the main romcom story. Feng takes fine aim at the rise of the super rich, their lavish lifestyles, and their choice of vapid entertainment and consumerism.

Years of mainstream filmmaking has taught Feng to disguise the bitterness of his satire with sentimentality, yet it feels as though Feng still has some bite in him after all.