Stephen Chow’s King Of Comedy is a certified classic. One of the most refined examples of Chow’s unique style of Eastern slapstick, it’s basically one of those films that anyone interested in the acting craft needs to watch, as it covers a pretty wide variety of ‘method’ acting, it’s got some of Chow’s best gags (I’m still giggling at the stuntman-on-fire scene as I’m writing this), and I can pretty much guarantee you’ll feel good after watching it. It is, at the time of writing this, my favourite Chow film. Or, rather, it was… until I saw its spiritual successor.
In the 20-year gap between the original and this follow-up, Chow himself has gone from starring in his own productions to largely staying behind the camera and behind the scenes. That paradigm shift must have affected how he views the acting craft, because it’s not nearly as wide-eyed as it was in the original. Chow’s Wan Tin-Sau was a struggling actor who, despite all his clumsiness and lack of trajectory, kept pushing his way into the business because of his love of acting. By contrast, as we follow the likewise-determined Dreamy (E Jingwen as the latest actress to join the ‘Sing Girls’ club), we get a much more downtrodden depiction of that struggle.
I shouldn’t sell this film as being entirely depressing so soon, though, as this has comedic chops to match the original, and even surpass it in places. The international attention Chow has gotten in that two-decade interim has definitely informed his choice of parody targets, going beyond the John Woo satire of the original (which, admittedly, makes a welcome return here) and pokes fun at Hitchcock’s Psycho, adaptations of Western fairy tales, and even a bit of Birdman-style ribbing of obsessive method actors, represented here with Wang Baoqiang as Mr. Marco, a struggling former child actor who gets pushed into viral notoriety out of the director’s attempts to get the guy to actually emote on camera.
And it’s through his interactions with Dreamy, starting off with a frankly horrifying look at the mistreatment of extras (female extras in particular) and turning into a surprisingly natural buddy dynamic in how they end up lifting each other up by the end, that the film’s statements regarding the working conditions of actors hit their best notes. It plays out a bit like La La Land in how it holds up that dreamer’s idealism to back up the ambition behind the creatives on-screen, but doesn’t treat it with nearly as much artistic license as that film did. It admits the struggle, the lack of respect given to extras trying to make it in the business, and quite frankly, it doesn’t exactly blame anyone who sees all of this garbage and think it’s not worth dealing with.
But in the midst of all the slapstick, the genre pastiches, the ego flares between actors and directors (to the point where the two almost swap places as far as who’s in control), and the genuine heartbreak Dreamy is subjected to both in and out of the industry, the film’s empathetic framing never wavers for even a second.
It goes beyond the masterclass of the original and dives even deeper into emotional resonance, creating a film that… honestly, it reminded me a lot of my first-ever conversation with the editor over at FilmInk, AKA the guy who gave me a shot at writing reviews outside of this little blog bubble. It doesn’t pull any punches, it admits the hardships of the work involved, and it makes things absolutely clear as far as the chances of making it to that desired top-tier in the industry. But never once does it present any of that as a reason not to do it, serving as a realistic, but still hopeful, come-up story that might well be true-to-life for the actress at the centre of it all.
I mean, yeah, this technically came out last year (but is listed under this year because that’s when it came out in Australia; same as every other review on here), but with how shaken-up the film industry has been over the last several years, between the plentiful scandals and this year’s COVID calamity… have to admit, seeing a film that’s this joyous and heartfelt about one of the pillars of its own existence has kinda got me in tears right now, and I’ll recommend it to the end of the universe just for that feeling.
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