The New King of Comedy (Stephen Chow, 2019)

Note to self: when the world of cinema is letting you down, just see a Stephen Chow movie.

For one thing, even when the plot is silly, even preposterous, Chow's films are just so well directed. He is that rarest of creatures, a maker of comedies who actually attends to the basics of cinema. The clearest example of this is Chow's preference for composing establishing shots on the diagonal, like some bastard child of Jerry Lewis and Giorgio de Chirico. But this is really just a subset of Chow's entire approach, which is to organize his scenes as fields of action, a dispensation of people and things that looks simple but is actually quite purposeful. 

This is no doubt a holdover from the early films, when Chow's own performances entailed more physical comedy than his current non-starring vehicles do now. As an actor, Chow was clearly an acolyte of Buster Keaton, using the most apparently banal of camera set-ups to provide an armature for his slapstick, knowing that a good deal of the comedy wasn't in what he did, but in his use of misdirection. Not unlike Tati (another obvious influence), Chow places what he needs in the field of action, but subtly, so that when a piece of the set or an ordinary object suddenly becomes the focus of our attention, that in itself is about 85% of the joke.

Chow doesn't really make films like that anymore, leaving his old "nonsense" style behind in favor of a neoclassical approach. Sometimes this doesn't work. CJ7, his Spielberg riff, fell a bit flat. But New King is more direct, a sort of "Hawks / Sturges on steroids" blend of rags-to-riches, go-getter cinema with a phony mean streak, subjecting his protagonists to increasing humiliation and abuse. But unlike so much contemporary comedy in this dark vein, Chow never lets us forget that he's committed to genre rules. We can laugh at the cruelty because we are sure that his underdogs will triumph in the end.

That's because New King signals its intent from the very start. Rumeng (E. Jingwen), the beleaguered movie extra who only wants to act her heart out, is a lovely woman. She's just not plastic, overly made up and contoured into a fantasy object. Chow is playing on the trope of the pretty girl who is cast as ugly, employing it an satirizing it at the same time. There is a populist message here, as there so often is in Chow's work. It's not just that hard work and fanatical dedication pay off in the end. Natural beauty, unmolested by a pseudo-Westernizing style of plastic surgery, will always rise to the surface, a vote in favor of authenticity that even the P.R.C. censors can get behind.

I always feel a bit awkward about analyzing Chow's films, because even though they deserve the critical attention, I feel as though I'm failing to convey just how funny they are. While New King doesn't have any one bit as uproarious as The Mermaid's police sketch scene, the treatment of the 21st century film industry here is as bitter as it is hilarious. "Making it" is framed as a kind of reality-TV inflected crapshoot, where knowledge and experience are virtually worthless. The first shot in the film is a close-up of Rumeng carrying Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares under her arm, and the scene concludes with the young actress discovering that actual physical agony isn't histrionic, but nearly silent. 

When she tries to apply this realism at an audition, she is cast aside as a no-talent. So we know that it's only a matter of time before Ma Ke (Wang Baoqiang), the old has-been who has logged his hours in the trenches of cinema, discovers Rumeng to be a kindred spirit. Both of them learn that chance and fate are more important, in the end, than talent. But you can't hope to get struck by lightning unless you're out there standing in the rain.