Shanghai Baby Hits The Big Screen

By Chris Devonshire-Ellis

Shanghai Baby, the somewhat trashy novel of life in up and coming Shanghai written by Wei Hui and popular a couple of years back, is now on the big screen, starring Bai Ling, Gregory Wong and Luke Goss.

While the novel appeared mainly to thinly disguise the real-life seedy exploits of a Shanghainese girl looking for love and security, the film goes one better by at least featuring Bai Ling, even if at times one can get just a little too much of her exposed, cork like nipples yet again. We got it first time – you’re playing a slut. The film portrays Bai as Coco, an out-of-sorts Shanghai babe, desperately wanting to fit into the modern drive of the city, yet always attracted to the wrong men. While the film, like the novel, positions itself in its defense as a tale of a girl “torn between traditional values and modern Shanghai society”, in reality in neither does the central character’s family come anywhere into it, betraying the fact that she’s a shallow, self centered girl just looking for sex, but also content to abuse her relationships while she does. Nowhere does any real notion of love as an emotion enter her mind.

Gregory Wong plays Tian Tian, the handsome, charming and talented painter, who succumbs to a Heroin problem, partly in loneliness as Coco pursues her attraction for a British expat, Marc, (Luke Goss) who at first seduces her in a nightclub, but then later rapes her in a toilet. It’s the only condescension the film makes to the brutality of many expatriate-Chinese relationships.

Tian Tian dies, and Coco, writing a “novel” about her experiences, writes it all down. At the end though, she doesn’t get the finish she wants, so makes one up, destroying Marc’s family in the process. Although one can feel Coco’s frustration with life, the film also portrays an increasingly amoral society and the violence that can ultimately bring. That’s a tough subject for a film to broach, and a worthy one. However, with Shanghai Baby, one gets the impression Bai Ling was just asked to take her clothes off to sell the movie and that while ultimately it may be a reflection of the abject selfishness each of the characters displays, does little to prove that Shanghai Baby is a film worthy of its potential subject matter.

Film Website

Bai Ling Official Website

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2. Film review: Shanghai Gesture
3. Shanghai Dancing
4. John Huie “Shanghai Jazz”
5. Empire Made Me – An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai

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