In The Movie Emperor, a superstar Hong Kong actor decides to experience real life in preparation for a new role. But can he rise above the pressures of the film business and a general apathy towards poverty-stricken people?
The Movie Emperor
Ning Hao (director), Liu Xiaodan (writer), Wang Ang (writer), Daniel Yu (writer), Wang Boxue (cinematography), Du Yuan (editor)
Andy Lau, Ning Hao (cast)
September 15, 2023 (TIFF)
The Movie Emperor follows Lau Wai-Chi or Dany Lau (Andy Lau), a megastar of the Hong Kong film industry who still can’t escape the shadow of his peers, like Jackie Chan. He’s also dealing with the fallout of a secret divorce from his secret wife. When Dany loses a top award to Chan, he does something completely unexpected. Dany takes on the role of a peasant in an upcoming film by a hard taskmaster of a director (played by director Ning Hao). Dany’s research will take him into villages amongst pigs and farmers, opening himself up to a new world of hurt.
Going into my final day at TIFF 2023, I knew The Movie Emperor was going to be a sendup of the film industry. I mean, Dany is an anagram of Andy, so I guessed that Lau would be playing an over-the-top version of himself! Director Ning Hao spoke after the film, sharing that he’d wanted to collaborate with Lau for many years, especially since Lau has supported his filmmaking. But Lau was “too civilized” to fit into Hao’s crazy type of comedy. When Hao told Lau that The Movie Emperor’s Dany would be an amalgamation of several actors to satirize the industry, Lau was quite reticent to come on board. He didn’t want to mock his contemporaries, but Hao said he’d be doing the same with directors, which put Lau at ease. In the end, the film questions the ways of the industry rather than calling out any individuals.
But The Movie Emperor is also a behind-the-scenes look into the making of films. Since Hao plays the director, those scenes feel very much like being on set with Dany and the crew. It also makes the scenes with the investors of the film rather poignant. Films can’t be made without investors, and in The Movie Emperor, both Dany and the director try to do as the investors say. Unfortunately, the investors are also nincompoops who try to inveigle themselves into the industry and muck up the entire filmmaking process as a result!
I was fascinated by the discussions on class divisions in The Movie Emperor. From the early scenes, it’s signposted that this will be an ongoing debate. At the start of the film, the audience learns that Jackie Chan has shockingly been nominated for best actor for playing a peasant, a role that shouldn’t win him any award, according to Lau’s entourage. When Chan does win, Dany’s entourage maneuvers him to get an award-winning “poor” role. Dany and everyone around him looks down on such a class of people, yet they’re quick to use those people’s lives and stories to win awards and get placements at film festivals.
To prepare for the role, Dany moves from his luxurious estate to an air-conditioned hotel room, which is nothing like the life of a peasant! It’s only after Dany starts filming that he makes a real effort to meet with the “poor” people he’s portraying, of course, ensuring he wears a mask throughout and doesn’t want to be touched by said people.
While the story of The Movie Emperor was enthralling, I loved the cinematic techniques Hao and cinematographer Wang Boxue used to place the audience amid the action. The film has long takes that let audiences experience events in real-time with Dany. Using simple pans, zooms, and blurs, the audience sees events as the characters do. It adds much more to the comedy yet is subtle enough not to overpower the story.
There’s another technique that I enjoyed—we often see the reaction before seeing the action. This is an unusual type of direction but it works very well to build suspense and deliver the punchline. One of such memorable scenes was when a character shows someone a video, and they both react in different ways to it—one looks perplexed, the other elated. Then Hao cuts to the video and the audience can make up their own minds about why the characters reacted the way they did and what it says about them. This method of delaying information lets the audience enjoy the actors’ expressions without dealing with our own reactions to an event.
The acting in The Movie Emperor is fabulous—it’s so easy to be over-the-top in comedy. Lau carries the film as the straight man in a satirical comedy. But he isn’t afraid to play up the physical comedy aspects when called for. Dany dancing on a squeaky chair because he’s enjoying the racket it makes tells us so much about Dany when he’s enjoying his own company.
My only criticism is that The Movie Emperor is overlong. There were probably eight different points when the film could have ended but continued. I’m not sure why those sections were left in because they didn’t reveal anything new about Dany or the film business but only belaboured the stupidity of the people involved in the industry. I also felt like the third act failed to capture the humour of the first two acts.
But for the most part, The Movie Emperor was delightfully hilarious. The jabs the film made were aimed at the industry, not the people nor the “peasants”. Lau’s acting was incredible to watch—and he was ably supported by the remainder of the cast. I particularly enjoyed the on-set scenes of the fictional film-within-the-film. The question is, will the people who can make a difference in the industry actually understand what the film is telling them?
