Fridae

Hu Jintao visiting the White House, Lang Lang playing an anti-American movie tune for the night’s entertainment, the Times Square LED screen showing promotional video about China’s peaceful rise – let’s face it, real life has pretty much turned out the way The Onion predicted, only funnier. What the futurologists at the online satire magazine forgot was that the new Chinese superpower would also come with its own middle class audiences eager to watch successful foreign films – but only if they are remade in Mandarin with Chinese stars because everyone hates watching films with subtitles.

And so we get What Women Want, a remake of What Women Want with Andy Lau as the Mel Gibson and Gong Li taking over the Helen Hunt role. Chen Daming, recognising the inherent soundness and comic value of the Nancy Myers romcom, produces a cautious, competent remake that is almost a carbon copy of the original.

If you must know, a male chauvinist advertising director finds his position in the firm threatened by a new female import, develops the power to read women’s minds, finds what every woman in the office thinks of his macho man schtick, then uses the power to compete with his new superior and unwittingly falls in love with her.

Aside from casting Chinese actors and updating the social context for modern-day Beijing, nothing much has changed in this remake. What’s different is the slightly different dynamic at work with the principal cast. Andy Lau may play the Mel Gibson role but he is no politically incorrect, slightly misogynistic manly man and has never been seen as one. Gong Li with her screen presence and charisma, plays a better corporate climber than Helen Hunt.

If you liked the original, this is probably just as funny. Though competent, the remake lacks imagination and misses the opportunity to either transcend the original or to be actually relevant to modern China. After all, this movie about advertising executives stealing ideas from each other takes place in a country where last year, international corporations like Google had their computer systems hacked and data stolen, and where haute coutre items go on sale in warehouses even before the fashion houses launch these new designs in a show in Milan!