Neither Here Nor There

A world-renowned American director, Don Tyler (Donald Sutherland), is trying to make a movie in Beijing's Forbidden City when he suffers a creative drought and can't even work out where to place the camera. He falls seriously ill, and his last wish, as he slips into a coma, is to have a "comedy funeral" in the Forbidden City. Accordingly, his cameraman YoYo (Ge You) markets the funeral as a globally televised event, auctioning ad space to Chinese companies. Huh? Precisely. Big Shot's Funeral, a comedic fable about the clash of cultures, isn't like anything you've seen before.

Somewhere in Feng Xiaogang's new film there's a course in contemporary Sino-U.S. relations, and students can sift through the plot to try to figure out who's laughing at whom, who's leading whom, who's doing what to whom—and why. And the very making of the movie raises a host of questions: Has Feng taken money from Columbia Pictures to make his film but stuck two fingers up at the U.S.? Or is he lampooning the circus that Beijing has become? Let the academics decide.

Feng, maker of smash hits Be There or Be Square and Sorry Baby, is China's most commercial filmmaker. Although Big Shot is his biggest project to date, this is not one of his more coherent efforts. He should either have explored the film-within-a-film theme more fully, or played for giggles; the two make discordant bedfellows. Characters drift from serious to incredibly silly. Sutherland shuffles around the Forbidden City, pontificating on Bernardo Bertolucci, on how to mix Western and Eastern cinematic culture and make the combination appeal to both audiences. Ge You delivers the movie's standout performance, full of shifting moods and emotions. But Rosamund Kwan, as Lucy, the go-between for Tyler and YoYo, is flatter than an airport runway as the woman caught between her Chinese roots and Western upbringing.

The marketing of Tyler's funeral produces Big Shot's most creative moments: among the bizarre product placements are contact lenses for the corpse's eyes, a bottle of mineral water propped in his hand, running shoes for his feet. Of course, we never get to see the funeral itself because Tyler makes a rapid recovery. The movie, unfortunately, doesn't.