《我是路人甲》

    Starring: Wan Guopeng, Wang Ting, Shen Kai, Xu Xiaoqin, Lin Chen, Wei Xing, Jiang Tao, Kou Jun

    Director: Derek Tung-shing Yee

    THIS is a film that gives focus to the extras who struggle to get their big break in a Chinese salute to the film industry.

    After directing the suave divertissement “The Great Magician,” Hong Kong action director Derek Tung-shing Yee takes time out to salute the film industry’s humblest also-rans, the extras who mutely toil in the background while aspiring to fame, glory or at least a regular income.

    “I Am Somebody” (“Wo Shi Lu Ren Jia”) probably doesn’t rise high enough on the sophistication meter to attract much attention abroad. While China’s sprawling Hengdian studio lots make exotic sets (including what looks like a life-size Forbidden City), the interwoven stories of poor extras drifting into town from all over the provinces are highly predictable.

    In any case, the film, which opened the Shanghai Film Festival last month, is easy watching thanks to the fresh faces and bright energy of the young leads, all cast from the Hengdian lots. Cameos by famous faces including Andy Lau, Daniel Wu and Anita Yuen made audiences swoon at the film’s premiere. Whether all this will translate into domestic box-office gold like Yee’s action hits “Triple Tap” and “Protégé” will be seen when the film opens today.

    The hero is the friendly, comic-faced Peng, who is barely 18 when he leaves his snowy northern hometown to try his luck in Hengdian. Ruefully aware he has no acting training, he makes up his mind to substitute the drama academy with practical experience and the school of hard knocks. The audience is on his side from scene one, and continues to warm to his self-deprecating sense of humor as he learns the ropes of courting casting directors and getting noticed. His love interest is the pretty Ting, who has made even greater sacrifices than him to buck her middle-class family and try to be an actress.

    Her girlfriends are busy trying to avoid the casting couch — some of whom are too naive to even know what that is. An established couple who live together in a garret are painfully inching up the ladder to speaking roles. Kai and his wife present yet another example of an acting duo forced to choose between raising a family and moving into bigger, but still ill-paid, speaking roles.

    Yee, who has screenplay credit, wrote all the parts after on-site research on the studio lot. It does feel like a labor of love with its heart in the right place, and while this approach pays off in realism, there is a trade-off in drama. At times the grittiness seems like scripted documentary. One of the most fascinating scenes lists the going rates for extras: US$7 a day for just walking around, with additional cash for kissing (US$15), nudity (US$150), lying in water, playing dead, and so on. TV stars can wrangle US$50,000 per episode, but regular actors average only US$80 a day.

    While half of the film is realistic, there’s also a lot of conventional narrative weighing things down. In the course of the film, each character is presented with moments of self-doubt and the temptation to opt out. Some do, some don’t, and everything ends with a deja-vu homage to budding young talent (“Flashdance”) and young love (“The Graduate”).

    The rare moments of truth tend to leap out of a sea of nice, standard comedy — Peng and his pals involved in the numbing boredom of costumers, the muddy discomfort of war movies, and so on. The finest scene is a heartbreaker: the talented Kai has finally gotten his big break, but family turmoil makes him unable to remember his lines. All the faces are so wonderfully pliant and the body language so highly expressive (especially Peng’s) that one leaves the cinema hoping they’ll all make it into the opening credits.

    The movie is now being screened in Shenzhen. (SD-Agencies)