Box Office Surprise: Jin Yimeng's Romantic Comedies Are Finding an Audience

Fan Bingbing can’t find a man? Sounds hard to believe, but the conceit carries in the latest rom-com from director and screenwriter Jin Yimeng, who reasserts her box office muscle with the release Friday of One Night Surprise (Yi Ye Jing Xi), this month, just in time for Chinese Valentine’s Day on August 13.

The film follows Fan, a white-collar manager who has succeeded in business but not in love, as she attempts to discover which of three handsome men, played by Daniel Henney, Arif Rahman (Li Zhiting), and Jiang Jingfu, respectively, is the father of her baby.

One Night Surprise is Fan's second comedy with Jin, having appeared in her debut effort, Sophie’s Revenge (Fei Chang Wan Mei), which also starred Zhang Ziyi. The movie put Jin in an elite group – Chinese directors whose films have grossed over RMB 100 million at the domestic box office.

Although Fan’s leading-lady looks and screen presence usually lead her away from comic roles, she’ll do them on one condition: "I'm only going to do comedies if they're Jin's," she said, saying at a press launch for the film that the director understands women and knows how to write for them.

Two of the big differences between the films relate to the maturity of the main characters, and Jin’s own sensibilities when she created them. “Sophie’s Revenge was a script I wrote 10 years ago when I was still in the US," she said. "I was really just a girl then, and the character in the film was also just a girl. Fan’s character [in One Night Surprise] is older, more experienced; she’s had a much wider experience of life.”

Jin herself doesn’t face Fan’s cinematic travails, either: in real life, she’s happily married.

Fan's stardom continues to rise, with One Night Surprise giving her a relatively rare opportunity to be the film's lead, not just its lead actress. She was recently named China's top celebrity in a Forbes magazine list, and The Hollywood Reporter honored her as their International Artist of the Year at May’s Cannes Film Festival. She's had a cameo in Iron Man 3, recently shot scenes for X-Men: Days of Future Past, in which she appears as Blink and is set to star in the next Jackie Chan film. Still, one of her best known performances was her indie turn in Lost in Beijing, in which she plays a foot massage attendant abused by the store's owner.

Jin believes that dearth of diversity gives her films appeal to Fan and the other top actresses with whom she was worked, including Zhang Ziyi and Yao Chen. "She's very talented, and she's desperately looking for different genre material and specifically for lead female roles."

Actresses in China are still limited by the material that is offered to them. "When there are no great characters, they can't really unleash themselves. For female actors especially, having characters written specifically for them helps them," Jin said.

"The romantic comedy is well developed in Hollywood but not here, I want to bring that to China," Jin said. "We don't have many genre films at all – horror, thrillers, detective stories, teenage movies. I feel like the industry only really started [branching out] since 2009," Jin said. The problem is not just the material, but those creating it. “Most screenplays in China are still written by novelists or by television writers, not by people who are writing specifically for film.”

Describing whether she chose her male leads based on looks or talent, Jin said, "There are so many movies for men in China, I just want to make movies to make women happy."

Fan was a bit more circumspect about the men that appear in the film. “I expect all my collaborators to be intelligent and wise,” she said, not specifying any desired physical attributes.

Jin said she will continue to write comedies, but wants to move on to larger fare. “I want them to be bigger, maybe fantasy comedies,” she said, with more fanciful elements. She would also consider directing material not her own.

“I would love to have a great script written for me [to direct]. I get scripts all the time, but in the end it would take more time to rewrite them than to write something original,” Jin said.

One Night Surprise opens today (Friday Aug 9) at cinemas around Beijing.

Photos: Courtesy of Jin Yimeng.