For those who loved the East/West battle in Crazy Rich Asians and The Farewell you will appreciate the family spectacle in “Go Back to China” which is a slightly smaller, but equally pleasant experience. It incorporates the lifestyle glamor from the first movie and the family drama of the latter. Emily Ting’s second scripted feature is more like a fictionized version of her own story, “Family Inc.” She documented her moving from New York City to Hong Kong. The move was both reluctant and rewarding. The training of running her father’s plush toy factory came with a twist; her father was extremely hot-tempered.
Although it did not win any major award at the competition, it is one of those movies that is pleasant and easy to enjoy, appealing to a wider audience which is bound to sell more home formats. This movie has already screened at SXSW for a year, and now, Gravitas Ventures will give it an On Demand release along with a few theaters in the US this Friday.
As Ting, she has an alter ego a caricatured Sasha Li (YouTuber and actress Anna Akana in her first leading role), a party girl from Los Angeles whose work seems to revolve around clubbing with her entourage of equally glamorous twenty-somethings. She completed fashion school a year earlier but has since been unemployed which is quite surprising considering how every other aspirant in the design world has paid their dues by working as a lowly intern or assistant. She lacks any form of work experience as her Chinese father who abandoned her mother, pampered her lavishly throughout her life.
Aside from that, they’re pretty much estranged apart from the financial ties. That however, shifts when Dad Teddy (Richard Ng) suddenly cuts off the cash flow and tells her that she has to work a year at his factory in Shenzhen ( a booming city of up to 20 million a few hours drive north of Hong Kong) before he supports her. This is dreadfully inconvenient for a number of reasons. Not least, the fact that the completely American Sasha can hardly understand or speak Chinese. But when her rent check bounces, she has no option but to comply.
Aside from tending to business, Daddy has clearly been busy. His imposing mansion contains an astonishing number of unmet half-siblings from his ex-wives, such as his latest mistress with bratty twin sons Christian “Tiger Ting” and Dior “Aviva Wang.” However, the first lady is Sasha’s elder half-sister known as Carol (Lynn Chen) who is also American but has been living here for a decade after taking up a position as deputy to her father’s factory.
The job isn’t very rewarding Sasha soon learns, and neither is life with Teddy who means well, but is also supremely childish and throws temper tantrums too regularly, and far too frequently directs his ire toward subordinates. When foreign buyers reject his Christmas toy line, Sasha steps in trends and introduces mounted rifles to turkey costumes giving her father’s golden girl status. But after her blunder in self-sufficiency leads to a major mistake, she and her father are left with a delicate reconciliation that may very well be set ablaze.
“Go Back to China” is certainly an improvement from Ting’s narrative feature Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong, which was overly reliant on a walk-and-talk romance style similar to that of “Before Sunrise.” But even here, she still demonstrates a tad too much caution in adhering to predictable shifts in tone and structure, sometimes incorporating uncontextualized social gaffes about international manufacturing and trade. The pointless lifestyle satire of the expository sequence (quoted verbatim in the mindless rendition of Hall & Oates’ “Rich Girl” that accompanies the end credits) is so dull that it must be noted with some relief when Sasha starts being more than a little resourceful at the factory she is shown to be hating. The director’s take is appalling, however, in how he attempts to resolve real-world problems such as worker/management conflicts and other issues in the simplest, most superficial manner possible.
If there is not so much to tell this family drama from the other socio-economical ones here, nor any great wit to the comic ones, “Go Back” is still charming as a well-known tale of a stranger in a foreign country in a fresh context. The competent actors and modern editing do not allow one’s attention to wander from the upbeat ending which, while overly familiar, inappropriate, and, quite frankly, expected, is still glad to see.
Even if the production values are at a professional standard, Ting’s visual collaborators still missed the mark since they could have designed something more playful and stylish than the movie’s competent yet ordinary widescreen appearance.
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