Andrew Y. S. Cheng | 我們害怕 (Shanghai Panic) / 2001

exploring life and death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Y.S. Cheng and Mian Mian (screenplay, based on the fiction We Are Panic by Mian Mian), Andrew Y. S. Cheng (director) 我們害怕 (Shanghai Panic) / 2001

 

Bei (Zhinan Li), Kika (Mian Mian), Fifi (Yuting Yang), along with Caspar (He Wei Yan) are a loosely structured “family” of three women and a young man all of the so-called jeunesse dorée, (the pampered young “little emperors”—as critic Neil Young describes) them—products of the for communist government’s one-child policy. These Shanghai babies do not simply undergo a mad panic in this film, but have already experienced a life—as they move from one club to another, from ephedrine and ketamine to other combinations of drugs, and from one sex partner to the next—of continued disenchantment, frustration, and failed suicide attempts.

      The momentary “panic” they first undergo in Andrew Cheng’s version of Mian Mian’s banned fiction, is former ballet dancer Bei’s sudden fear that he is HIV-positive. He has fevers that don’t go away, a semen-like liquid in his urine, and a general feeling of dread—all having descended upon him without any evidence that he has had any gay sex, or even heterosexual intercourse for that matter.

     Despite the worry of, in particular, the group’s leader Kika, he refuses to go for a check-up, having heard the rumor (highly possible given China’s draconian control over its citizens) that the government ships off its HIV-positive citizens to an offshore prison island. The only answer is women friends offer up is more clubbing and more drugs, all to no avail.

     When Kika finally drags him off to a doctor who promises them that no such actions will occur, Bei is tested only to discover that he is negative.

    As one critic suggested, his AIDS scare may have had to do with the fact that he has been long considering that it’s time to explore homosexuality, and with the help of Kika, who seems to have property both in Shanghai and at the beach, shacks up with the very best friend, fellow dancer Jie (Zhou Zi Jie) to see if he might seduce him into having sex.

      The two loll about, do some kissing, and a great deal of talking before Jie finally refuses him, in part for fear that after having sex he’ll lose his friend forever, but also because, as it appears, both of them are really straight.

      The closest we get to sex is Jie dancing to some studio music in a manner that all recognize as truly sexy and original. Indeed, one might describe Cheng’s film as a fake lure for gay desire. All you need to do is focus the camera for a while on a couple of cute boys taking about having sex, and the entire LGBTQ community will welcome your film into our hearts!

      In reality, as it becomes apparent, Bei seems now more interested in the pedophile images he’s discovered on a “Lolita” site, without even knowing what the name Lolita refers to or what a pedophile might be. Like his other sexual identities, it may, hopefully, be only one which he is momentarily exploring.

      We know that their various anxieties are serious business, however, because director Cheng films this fictional work as if it were a documentary, asking his actors to mostly improvise as they go along, resulting in long passages of talk upon a couch or quick suggestive asides in the midst of illegal shopping sprees (Fifi, for example arousing the interest of a policeman, allows him to buy her a new wardrobe before she runs off from a local Starbucks with her “presents” in hand). Cheng’s club-movie imitations, his hand-held camera fluttering around rooms—as Young puts it, “he can’t seem to get enough of the blurry, jerky slow-motion facility on his video-camera”—now seem as stylized as Michelangelo Antonioni’s characters wandering across islands, deserts, and city streets or Federico Fellini’s circus-like creatures parading down the strand.

      Yet, we do encounter in Cheng’s version of the wild Shanghai kids, a city which at the time was seen to be far more interesting to the young than Hong Kong, a vision of youth that we might never before have imagined. The reviewer from Time Out postulated that it might “Very possibly [be] the start of a new chapter in Chinese cinema.”

      But, alas, we know where that ended with rise of Xi Jinping to the role of general secretary in 2012 and to President in 2013. Whenever Cheng’s film might have taken Chinese cinema, he and others quickly met up with a brick wall. Cheng made only one further feature film, the futurist 目的地，上海 (Welcome to Destination Shanghai, 2003) with the city now crumbling and filled with poverty and social decay, featuring “male prostitutes, aging hookers, and other sex-trade workers.”

 

Los Angeles, August 27, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).