Starring: Liu Ye, Aloys Chen, John Woo, Zhao Benshan, Chow Yun-fat, Huang Lei, Andy Lau, Dong Jie, Zhou Xun Directors: Han Sanping, Huang Jianxin

    THE shrewd idea by China Film Group head Han Sanping of “selling” official anniversary movies to the general public by cramming them with star cameos worked a treat in 2009’s “The Founding of a Republic,” made to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. The clever marketing wheeze gets a second outing in the more clumsily titled “Beginning of the Great Revival,” celebrating the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai — and the result still works, though to a lesser extent.

    It still works because Han and his returning co-director, experienced veteran Huang Jianxin (“The Black Cannon Incident,” “Signal Left, Turn Right,” “Gimme Kudos”), manage through sheer technique to turn an episodic, cameo-studded structure into a genuine big-screen experience by changing mood at a moment’s notice; but to a lesser extent because the drama, set during just a 10-year period, is smaller in scope and inherently less panoramic, and because the star-cameo concept is a tad less fresh.

    As in the first film, many cameos didn’t make the final cut because of running-time considerations — reportedly, some 60 cameos (including Tang Wei) were ditched, representing 18 minutes of screen time, and may later be put online.

    However, with Hong Kong stars like Chow Yun-fat, Andy Lau, Simon Yam, Daniel Wu and Nick Cheung, and Mainlanders like Liu Ye, Aloys Chen, Zhou Xun, Wang Xuebing and Wang Xueqi, the movie still has considerable wow factor, with the audience continually involved in a game of spotting faces.

    For foreign viewers unacquainted with the complex ins-and-outs of the period, the movie will take some following, though the history has been cleverly compressed and sticks pretty closely to events, allowing for some cinematic licence. To its credit, there is some time spent on how the CCP groped its way towards a unified political stance, flirting with and then rejecting other revolutionary and communist models to finally come up with one that suited the Chinese (rather than European or Russian) experience. And though brief, many of the cameos etch characters in a succinct and immediate way.

    Kudos in that respect seems to go to co-director Huang Jianxin, whose ‘90s movies were especially good in social observation and character development. Han’s contribution appears to be more on the visual/design side (acknowledged in his own micro-cameo as a photographer), and here, even more than in “Republic”), the film comes up with several jaw-dropping setpieces between the political stuff. The 10-minute sequence of the May 4 Movement protests is true big-screen cinema, a New Year sequence featuring Mao and his second wife in Beijing has a fairytale atmosphere, and the staging of the actual CCP founding (by a dozen characters on a boat in a lake) is genuinely inspired in movie terms, with actress Zhou used in an almost mystical way.

    Though the film as a whole is not so grand in scope as “Republic,”production values are a notch better, with superbly-lit widescreen photography by Zhao Xiaoshi and an involving musical score again by Shu Nan. Some actual black and white documentary footage is included, but relatively little this time round.

    The movie is now being screened in Shenzhen.

    (SD-Agencies)