Father

'Bad-boy' novelist Wang Shuo ran headlong into the brick wall of Film Bureau censorship with this adaptation of his own 1991 novel I'm Your Dad. The film was not seen anywhere until an English subtitled print was smuggled to Europe in 2000 for festival screenings. Ma Linsheng (Feng, also the co-writer and designer) is a minor Party functionary, a recent widower sharing his old Beijing courtyard apartment with his schoolboy son Ma Che (Hu). The first hour explores the generation gap, attitude gap and emotional tensions between father and son with a fair degree of wit and sympathy for both sides. But everything falls apart after the boy pushes his father into a second marriage. The film loses touch with recognisable realities and lapses into over-heated rhetoric and fantasy. Still, some of the satire bites.