7月份电影上映时写下的文章。每次回头看以前写过的东西，总有可以值得推敲和改进的地方，这大概就是进步吧。
Chinese moviegoers should not be unfamiliar with these two partners--Xu Zheng and Ning Hao. It is the fifth time that they two teamed up in a movie. The first four were well received at the box-office, but their latest collaboration, Dying to Survive, clearing 100 million dollars only on its debut, has eclipsed those in many aspects.
Cheng Yu, the character Xu Zheng plays in the movie, is a cash-strapped adult shop owner struggling through his middle-age crisis. Desperate about his ex-wife’s attempt to take over his son’s custody and his father’s astronomical medical expenses, he starts to smuggle and sell unlicensed generic leukemia drugs. Aided by a leukemia patient Lv (played by Wang Chuanjun), he is able to sell the affordable drugs to some patients afflicted by catastrophic health expenses.
Along the way to expanding sales, he gets in with another three people: an introverted loutish boy who robs Cheng Yu to save a leukemic girl, a single mother who works as a stripper to pay for her daughter’s pricey medicine bills, and a priest who helps sooth the disease-plagued patients' agony in the church, all of whom are brought together by somewhat of connection with leukemia, and later form a mixed bag of business partners with Cheng Yu. With these four people from distinctive backgrounds joining in, they form an Avengers-like squad working underground to help the disadvantaged, adding humanitarian and heroic elements to the story. There is such requisite tug at the heartstrings when an old patient begs the police desperately to let Cheng off the hook that even steely viewers will find themselves moist-eyed.
seem to change gears, from shrewd businessmen to
Cheng’s motives are anything but charitable initially. But as two of his teammates tragically die, Cheng, out of his guilt and empathy for the diseased, switch gears from a shrewd businessman to a philanthropist, picking up selling the drugs at extremely low price to the detriment of his interest. In this sense, Dying to survive takes on two levels of meaning. First, it symbolizes patients’ helpless desire to live. Second, it is a sign a salvation. Knowing he might spend the rest of his life in jail, Cheng still runs the risk of selling the drugs to save as many people as he possibly can. His insistence finally grants him a second life, and also pushes the medical reform in China.
Like Xu Zheng's previous work Lost in Thailand, Dying to Survive is interspersed with some witty moments, and also smacks of exotic touch with those Indian scenes. But he rises beyond that this time. Inspired by a real-life story, this movie touches a quite sensitive issue in China--the dysfunctional health-care system and its stagnant reform in China. It also lays bare the devastating cruelty of poverty and death, themes always shunned in most Chinese movies. Plus, religion is another unusual presence in the movie, given the fact that the government has done utmost recently years to suppress the freedom of religion.
Inevitably, audiences may find echoes of Dallas Buyers Club in this movie. Compared with the Oscar-winning film, what might be less extraordinary though, is the depth of the sensitivity it reaches. Dallas sheds light upon the heroic revolt against the machinery of the medical establishment and the government as well as the hostile public attitude towards LGBT communities back in the 80s, while Dying to survive fails to scrutinize the rotten medical system. However, it already dwarfs most Chinese movies in term of its depth and the actors' performance. After all, it is already a success that such a movie has managed to pass the notorious censorship in China.
Each July and August mark the typically big months for home-made movies, with few Hollywood blockbusters to be seen on Chinese screens. Luckily, with Dying to survive, this vacuum of imported films won’t seem that long and boring.
