dramedy
CJ7 (PG)
100 minutes/Opens tomorrow/*** 1/2
SWEET is not normally a word one associates with comedian Stephen Chow. After all, he made his name and fortune with his mo lei tao (Cantonese for make no sense) brand of knockabout comedy.
But the writer-director is all fuzzy warmth in his latest film CJ7. He plays dirt-poor labourer Ti, a widower and devoted Dad who struggles to raise his son Dicky (China newcomer Xu Jiao in a gender-bending turn).
Ti slogs in the construction industry in order to send Dicky to a posh school where his schoolmates scoff at his mended shoes and dirty appearance.
When Dicky covets a new robot toy dog, Ti tries to placate him with a plastic ball found at the garbage dump instead. But the ball morphs into a cutesy alien pet that looks like a cross between Star Trek's Tribbles and the flexible green flubber from The Absentminded Professor (1961). The delighted Dicky promptly christens his new pet CJ7.
Chow might be trying his hand at a new genre, the family-friendly fantasy, but he has not forgotten that his fans still enjoy silly physical slapstick humour.
So there are assorted subplots which offer opportunities for the kind of broad humour that has made him so popular.
Among Dicky's schoolmates is the oversized Maggie, played by adult male actor Han Yong Wua. The laughs here come from the fact that a little girl's voice issues from that obviously male, cross-dressing bulk.
But this is tame stuff by Chow's standards. Where CJ7 scores is its tender portrait of a father-son relationship. The little alien pet makes its appearance only 30 minutes into the film and Chow the writer-director is careful to build the bond between Ti and Dicky so that the audience is emotionally invested in the denouement to come.
He also cannily uses humour to defuse any possible saccharine traps that might have doomed a less deft film-maker.
The family's poverty, for example, is not played for easy pathos. The hovel Ti and Dicky live in might be dirty, but Ti turns the cockroach infestation into a father-son bonding exercise as crushing them becomes an after-dinner game.
More intriguingly, there is buried social commentary in here about the booming economy of China, how this is impacting the values of the Chinese people in a negative way and the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Had this strand been developed further, CJ7 could have had real bite as social satire a la the classic Shaw film The House Of 72 Tenants (1973), which Chow referenced in his last film Kung Fu Hustle (2004).
But Chow chooses the mass entertainment path with a fairly traditional story arc that draws on the history of Chinese film weepies where usually a mother sacrifices all for her children.
This makes CJ7 heartwarming fare for families during the festive season.