Starring: Jia Ling, Zhang Xiaofei, Shen Teng, Michael Chen, Liu Jia, Ding Jiali, Wei Xiang Director: Jia Ling

THE hotly anticipated new Spring Festival movies were finally released, and broke the single-day box office record. Among them, “Hi, Mom” is unique, in that it has a continuous stream of related topics popping one after another on the hot search lists of social media platforms.

Although a comedy, the mood of the movie is pessimistic. Director and leading actress Jia Ling uses her biological mother Li Huan-ying, who was unfortunately killed in an accident at the age of 48, as the main focal topic. Fortunately, the essence of the film is relatively euphemistic. In the film, protagonist Jia Xiaoling’s mother, Li Huanying, fell into a severe coma due to a car accident. The two had traveled in 1981 to make up for the shortcomings in their relationship.

After the film was released on Chinese New Year’s Day, it scored extremely high on Maoyan, China’s biggest online movie-ticketing platform. It’s box office exceeded 2.1 billion yuan (US$325 million) Feb. 16, the fifth day since its release, with a score of 8.2.

In the movie, Jia Xiaoling, after experiencing the car accident of her mother Li, traveled through time and space to return to the past, sharing her youth with her young mother, and chasing her dreams.

In this comedy film about a mother’s youth, we saw many happy scenes: Jia helped her mother win the chance to purchase a TV set, organized female workers and her mother to participate in volleyball games, and helped her mother and the factory director’s son Shen Guanglin fall in love. She used her own way to make her young mother happy.

The story is told in a special way, retaining the characteristics of the comedians and sketch actors themselves, and borrowing the personal characteristics of the actors, such as Feng Gong’s phrase “Dear fellow workers, I want to kill you,” or the humorous dislocation of the plot, such as trying to match the mother with Shen on a movie-dating night but bought two movie tickets far away and many other embarrassing scenes. In the laughter, people seemed to forget that the movie was to commemorate her mother.

In the constant laughter, there is a hidden line. Jia, who travels through time and space, wants to help her mother change her destiny. She hopes that her mother will be like Wang Qin, another woman with a successful career, a wealthy family, and a child with a monthly salary of 80,000 yuan working for a famous university. But the young mother always says that as long as her child lives healthy and happy, she would be satisfied. At the end of the film, Jia finally realizes that the best way to make her mother happy is to cherish her child — herself in this case.

The movie is now being screened in Shenzhen.

(SD-Agencies)