The first 15 minutes of Take Off cite Hegel not once but twice. It goes without saying how unique this aspirational source is within the context of global cinema. Only in China can a feel-good film with mainstream ambition point to Georg W.F. Hegel, the notoriously dense 19th century German idealist whose dialectics blossomed into dialectical materialism under the tutelage of Karl Marx. “A nation is hopeless without those who look up to the stars,” the quote goes, situating individual aspirations within national ones. The quote also points upward, in a literal sense, to the sky, and here works winkingly with the film’s narrative about a man who reluctantly picks up his self-made flying device one last time in roder to save his nephew. The most amusing aspect of the quote’s inclusion is that there is no evidence Hegel ever wrote or said this; it even sounds too pithy to be from the Hegel encountered by humanities students in graduate school. Yet the very invocation of his name functions as a kind of motivational cue. This tells us something about the state of mainstream film in the mainland: dialectical materialism (or the appearance of it) is king — or chairman?
Jiang Qiming, hot in the press right now from Once Upon a Time in the Middle East, plays Li Mingqi, a factory worker in Northeast China’s rustbelt who learns to fly. A dream passed down from his father, Li scratches his itch with hot air balloons, though it is his own self-made parachute-and-jetpack flying device that he is really passionate about. But an accident leaves his brother-in-law disabled, and the guilt freezes his passion. The film begins in the 1970s and moves through the present, witnessing economic change and reform in the process. A television show that gamifies profit certainly encapsulates these reforms, and when Li’s nephew is in need of emergency surgery that his family can’t afford, the flying man pulls out his suit for one last jump. If he can jump from the radio tower (representing the rustbelt’s industrial past) and land on his feet in a small circle by a faraway river (indicating a new direction for its future), he will win the funds his nephew needs.
In design, Li’s flying device shares more with a flying squirrel than it does Iron Man. Fabric and aerodynamics take precedence over the industrial materials that aesthetically resemble accessories, though they are obviously important to the pseudo-science involved. The lightness and traditional look of the machine particularly stand out given Li’s own factory job and the rustbelt setting. The ragdoll kineticism of the special effects, meanwhile, with the wind bullying Li’s fragile body (before he finalizes the device), has an endearing kitsch, even if the effects break verisimilitude.
At its core, Take Off is a familiar feel-good story of a man achieving his lifelong dream, while also saving the life of a loved one to do so. Based on a novel by Shuang Xuetao, the formula is as predictable as dawn: the protagonist will encounter a little hardship that hardens his heart over the years, before triumphing in ultimate spectacle. Which is to say, there are no surprises — the culture that shapes the story doesn’t change the formula itself. The gamification of the family’s economic hardship — created by a misdiagnosis of the nephew’s condition and furthered by a second failure that puts the financial onus on the family — ironically, and likely unintentionally, dims the influence of the state in all this. It’s tough to feel that good when, instead of making Li risk his life for a stunt that should kill him, the state could just either provide adequate healthcare or give the family the funds.
Take Off is the fourth feature from director Peng Fei Song, a young mainland director with cosmopolitan inclinations. He studied at the International Institute for Image and Sound (3iS) in France and got his start in film as a co-writer on the beloved Malaysian-Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang’s Straw Dogs. His fourth feature is certainly his most commercial yet — and thus, the least Tsai of his still budding career — but he makes no shame of his own fondness for the rest of the world. There are plenty of foreigners in Take Off — Russians and Americans included among them — and none of them are here cast in the role of villains. American pop music also provides the backbone of the film’s soundtrack, while another guest trying out for the talent show impersonates Michael Jackson. Li even cosplays as Zorro. These globalized references that pad the film start to finish are complemented by allusions to Monkey King and Journey to the West, amongst other more characteristically Chinese cultural products, but Peng’s obvious appreciation for Western, and especially American, culture in Take Off places the director in the middle of a current that usually flows the other way. Jiang’s aforementioned Once Upon a Time in the Middle East — where a chef at a Chinese restaurant in a fictional Middle East country finds himself in a violent cultural predicament when an American war destabilizes the country — reflects the more characteristic direction the Chinese mainstream tends to go. Peng goes another way.
Still, despite the atypical Western neutrality, Peng’s fourth film is his most commercial film so far, and is also unique in not enmeshing itself in the world of those living on the margins of Chinese society. Flipping from the sky above to the ground below, his first feature, Underground Fragrance (2015), revolved around poor, migrant, and disabled workers in Beijing’s Underground City. His next film, The Taste of Rice Flower (2017), was set on the Sino-Burmese border and centered on characters from the Dai minority. 2021’s Tracing Her Shadow tackled the thorny subject of Japanese orphans abandoned after the war in the Manchurian northeast (the same region where his latest film is set). By contrast, Li and his family are remarkably average for their time and place — even if the scale tips a little toward struggling — and the closest his new film gets to the margins is via the brother-in-law, who is disabled after the accident but can still work. In this way, Peng’s move toward center doesn’t seem incidental: after all, it’s much easier to go mainstream when the characters reflect the mainstream.
DIRECTOR: Peng Fei Song; CAST: Jiang Qiming, Li Xueqin, Dong Baoshi, Jiang Wu, Yang Le; DISTRIBUTOR: Orchid Street Media; IN THEATERS: September 17; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 3 min.
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