MCLC: Tiny Times

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Tiny Times
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Source: ChinaFile (7/15/13): http://www.chinafile.com/rite-passage-nowhere

A Rite of Passage to Nowhere
“Tiny Times,” Chinese Cinema, and Chinese Women
By YING ZHU, FRANCES HISGEN

Tiny Times, a Chinese feature film set in contemporary Shanghai, made
headline news on its opening day in late June by knocking  the Hollywood
blockbuster Man of Steel from its perch atop the domestic box-office and
breaking the opening-day record for a Chinese-language 2D release.

The film follows four college girls as they navigate romance and their
professional aspirations, but the bulk of the film is about the female
longing for a life of luxury in the company of a good-looking man. Tiny
Times is not a women’s film, though it does feature female characters,
draped from head to toe in designer clothes and easily mesmerized by the
presence of supposedly visually stunning males—not the usual, muscle-bound
Hollywood types, but Asian boys of androgynous demeanor with compact
frames, equisite facial contours and the look of perpetual youth.

At first glance, Tiny Times might be mistaken for a Sinicized Sex and the
City, but soon it becomes clear that the four boy-crazed, mall-loitering
characters in Shanghai have little in common with the fiercely independent
career women in Candace Bushnell’s New York. Positioned in the market by
Le Vision Pictures of Beijing as a coming of age story, the rite of
passage for one dazed girl in the film is to grow into a competent
personal assistant to her oh-so-handsome male boss whose aloof demeanor
and penetrating gaze constantly destabilizes her. Another girl from a
nouveau riche family, showers her boyfriend with expensive clothes and
accessories. The third girl—chubby, suffering from stereotypically low
self-esteem and emotional eating—is made fun of throughout the movie as
she obsesses over young tennis player, the one man in the movie who
actually possesses something resembling muscle. The fourth girl, a budding
fashion designer from a humble background, is trapped in an abusive
relationship with yet another good-looking boy.

Taking a page from the book of popular East Asian “idol dramas” that cater
primarily to youth in their teens and twenties, the film features popular
singers, actors, and actresses, cast regardless of any actual acting
ability. Good idol dramas frequently feature teen romance, in which
brooding characters with dark secrets and painful pasts elicit pathos and
real emotion. Tiny Times, however, has done away with complex story arcs
and character development. The film looks great but ultimately lacks
substance.

The four characters’ professional aspirations amount to serving men with
competence. The film is a Chinese version of “chick flick” minus the
emotional engagement and relationship-based social realism that typically
are associated with the Hollywood genre. The only enduring relationship in
Tiny Times is the chicks’ relationship with material goods. The
hyper-materialist life portrayed carries little plot but serves as a
setting for consumption, and is more akin to MTV or reality TV than real
drama. With its scandalously cartoonish characters, the film would have
worked better as a satirical comedy, except that the director is too
sincere in his celebration of material abundance to display any sense of
irony.

We were caught completely off guard, stupefied by the film’s unabashed
flaunting of wealth, glamor, and male power passed off as “what women
want.” Its vulgar and utter lack of self-awareness is astonishing, but
perhaps not too surprising. It appears to be the product of full-blown
materialism in modern, urban Chinese society. The film speaks to the male
fantasy of a world of female yearnings, which revolve around men and the
goods men are best equipped to deliver, whether materially or bodily. It
betrays a twisted male narcissism and a male desire for patriarchal power
and control over female bodies and emotions misconstrued as female
longing. 

Whatever happened to Chairman Mao’s proclamation that “women hold up half
the sky”? In Tiny Times Chinese society has regressed to an earlier era.
Years of accelerating economic growth have brought unprecedented social
and geographic mobility, and increased pressure on Chinese men to succeed,
to follow the trail of power and money, leaving their women behind.
Economic growth has exacerbated the gender gap, often reviving cultural
traditions that reduce women to a sub-human status. The contempt for women
that I have witnessed in China in recent years is alarming. The male
chauvinism in the film is symptomatic of a society where the choices for
women are severely limited. The ones with bodies are enticed to become
material girls under the thumb of men, the ones with brains who dare to
use their thinking faculties are condemned to eternal loneliness, and the
ones possessing neither are banished to a corner.

Much to our horror and dark amusement Tiny Times’ director Guo Jingming,
won the award for “best new director” at the recently concluded Shanghai
International Film Festival. A film school dropout turned popular fiction
writer, Guo aspires to be an author of contemporary Shanghai. Though not a
Shanghai native, he nevertheless invokes the renowned Shanghai novelists
Eileen Chang and Wang Anyi as his predecessors. Guo’s imagination paints
Shanghai as a world city whose very spirit is equated with wealth and the
attendant decadence. Nevermind that he paints a world devoid of compassion
and humanity. Nevermind that the fabulously wealthy Shanghai in his
fictionalized world is hardly the reality for majority of citydwellers.

Guo claims to represent the post 1990s “me generation” and has apparently
hit a home run with the youth audience. According to the latest statistics
from the China Film Distribution and Exhibition Association, the average
age of a moviegoer in China has dropped to 21.2 years in 2012 from from
25.7 years in 2009. Tiny Times’s owes its success partly to a marketing
campaign that relied heavily on social media networks reaching tens of
millions of students.

The Chinese film industry has come aboard celebrating a work of fiction
with a dubious imagination, awful acting, and a story that is
non-existent. One can only surmise that Chinese cinema has momentarily
lost its way—in its desperate pursuit of domestic market share in
competition with a growing number of imported Hollywood blockbusters, the
Shanghai International Film Festival traded cinematic quality for
box-office returns. If this pattern holds, Chinese cinema will soon hang
by a thin thread. It cannot rely on weightless movies like Tiny Times to
sustain its market momentum.

It comes as a consolation to us that the film averaged low ratings of 3.4
and 5.0 out of 10 on China's two most-visited online movie portals,
mtime.com <http://www.mtime.com/> and douban.com <http://www.douban.com/>.
Director Guo said that Tiny Times allowed its viewers to dream about a
future with “a great career, great friends, and a handsome boyfriend.”
We're not at all sure if this is what Chinese President Xi Jingping had in
mind when he announced his opaque “Chinese Dream.” We sure hope that both
Chinese cinema and Chinese women can envision their own alternatives.

Dr. Ying Zhu, a professor in and Chair of the Department of Media Culture
at the College of Staten Island-CUNY, is the author or editor of eight
books, including Two Billion Eyes:...

Frances Hisgen is a high school student at the Brearley School in New
York. Her publications include “Feminism Is Not A Word We Use In Polite
Society.”