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Movie Review: Park Shanghai

Living lives that were over before they started - By Morgan Short, Feb 16, 09

It was a packed house for the premiere of local production Park Shanghai last Friday, and the film was warmly anticipated, coming to mainstream theaters in Shanghai as it did, as an indie success story from local director Kai Kevin Huang.

Originally coming from work Huang did while a student at Shanghai University (he was born in 1983), Park Shanghai was completed in 2008, but it's not only the production back story of Park Shanghai that was the source of local pride, but also the fact that the film itself endeavors to a realist depiction of the social and economic realities of young adults living in modern Shanghai that (presumably) marks its importance to the local film community.

This is "voice of a generation" stuff here.

Park Shanghai takes place over one night and follows a group of students meeting up at a KTV for a reunion party several years after graduation. Although most of the students are still well under 30, their lives have already been mapped out for them, either by career and/or marriage choices. The two main characters, Dong [Yun Wei] and Rerei [Ying-ying Chu], were formerly involved and still care for each other, but are now kept apart with the former scheduled to leave for a new job the next day (working in sales for a small paint company) and the latter already married ("conveniently", it would seem). Although the movie follows these two principal characters the most closely, there is also a well-developed roster of supporting characters that also factor into the narrative, offering, as they do, their own social circumstances, reinforcing the sense of monotonous disillusionment with adult life in Shanghai.

Mostly shot on a building rooftop and featuring the blurry uniformity of the Shanghai skyline as a symbolically weighty backdrop, Park Shanghai is a beautifully bleak story, illustrating that no prizes are at the end of the tunnel for young people graduating to adulthood in Shanghai. Under the superficial joy and nostalgia the characters feel about getting back in touch with one another is the heavy malaise and listlessness of people who are living lives that were over before they started. Worse, though, than the endless depictions of "innocence lost", is the sense of collective complacency held by the characters that this is how it is supposed to be.

An attitude of blind acceptance with cultural and economic mores predicates all the characters' actions, and although they are depicted with much compassion and emotion towards one another, it is this thick layer of blind faith in doing what they are taught and told that almost makes them unlikable.

By about half way through you just want to grab them by the throat and yell at them to quit their crappy jobs and go screw each other or something.

Grand rebellious gestures, although, are empty and hollow it would seem -- or are rather the lingering vestiges of childhood and immaturity that the characters are eager to escape from.

Park Shanghai ends up being a curiously stirring depiction of how life is sometimes beautiful but mostly shit for young adults in modern Shanghai, and it's a provocative first film from director Kai Kevin Huang who will no doubt go on to bigger and better things.

***

Below are some theatres that are showing the movie. Go see it. Really. It's got English subtitles.

-Cathay Theater (870 Huaihai Zhong Lu near Ruijn Er Lu)

-Paradise Warner Cinema City (Xujiahui, Grand Gateway 6/F)

-Studiocity Shanghai (Westgate Mall, 10th Floor, No. 1038 Nanjing Road (W))

-Shanghai Film Art Center (Xinhua Rd. 160)

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