ONE FOOT OFF THE GROUND review

Archive time again, with another mainland Chinese director who wowed the festival circuit with his debut then seems to have been unfairly neglected thereafter. The members of a rundown Peking opera troupe struggle to make ends meet in Chen Da-Ming's sparkling 2006 comedy-drama [i]One Foot Off the Ground[/i]. Find out why this film deserves a lot more love after the break.

There are many ways a director can choose to handle a line-up of non-professionals; scout around for people showing signs of real acting talent, but without the baggage that comes with a career in the industry; plan your film around a cast who can't be relied on to 'perform', or even engineer the production so the leads don't realise they're acting [i]per se[/i] (child actress Catinca Untaru in Tarsem Singh's [url=https://screenanarchy.com/site/view/tiff-report-the-fall/][i]The Fall[/i][/url]). Perhaps the most common, however - arguably the most reliable - is getting the actors to play themselves.

This can be as simple as handing them characters with the same names, or as ambitious as Laurent Cantet's [i]The Class[/i] ([i]Entre Les Murs[/i]), with a year in the life of an entire Parisian high school dramatised on camera. Zhang Yimou produced one of the most famous examples in Asian cinema with his acclaimed drama [i]Not One Less[/i] (a young would-be schoolteacher in the remote mainland countryside, with most of a tiny rural village playing themselves), but one recent addition to this particular sub-genre that went largely overlooked is Chen Da-Ming's 2006 sophomore effort [i]One Foot Off the Ground[/i].

The film is set among the members of a [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_opera]Peking Opera[/url] troupe, another advantage not only in selling a cast of unknowns (given they have experience performing) but also in building a general atmosphere of verisimilitude. Chen trained in an opera school (as many famous names in the Chinese film industry have done) and his respect for the artform and those people who practise it is obvious from very early on.

Soon after the movie opens, the troupe in question receive the unwelcome news the sponsorship money they urgently need to stay solvent has been stolen. All the members have been going without pay for some time and this latest setback means they have no choice but to shut their doors for a while and head back out into the real world, struggling to pay the bills while the director tries to find some other way of scraping funding together.

From here the film branches into several story threads, among them Ma San, the shy, introverted gambler desperate to win big on the cockfighting; Liu Bing, the photographer feeling trapped by his marriage to a rich man's daughter, eyeing up the youthful models who pass through his studio; Sihai, the cocky entrepreneur selling stolen dogs in the local market, and Sumei, the star of the troupe, forced to acknowledge how much her past glories have faded.

The cast are mostly members of the real-life troupe, only playing each other rather than themselves - [i]One Foot Off the Ground[/i] is based on real life, but various roles have been switched between the principals - yet what quickly strikes the viewer is how effortless it all seems. Obviously many of the cast are actors to begin with, yet the performances are largely excellent, with nothing to suggest the film is any kind of documentary. As with his 2002 debut [i]Manhole[/i] Chen wrote the script as well as directed, and the dialogue flows seamlessly from snappy banter to subtle exposition to genuinely affecting introspection.

The film becomes a genuinely entertaining comedy with some marvellous setpieces, short yet sweet (both witty and puerile); an enthralling (if fairly low-key) caper movie (what happened to the missing money?), and a gentle character study (the troupe and their various neuroses). Chen even manages a subtle commentary of sorts on the rapid pace of modernisation, both through offhand remarks about the city's history and the interplay between the cast. "Know what I miss the most?" Liu asks Ma, late in the running time. "Eating, drinking, talking, laughing together... we're always too busy. Doing what, I don't even know." Their rapport helps immeasurably in selling what could so easily have been empty platitudes and invests such lines with surprising depth.

The only real drawback would be [i]One Foot Off the Ground[/i] is perhaps a little too obviously a case of 'let's put on a show!'. Despite the impeccable timing and droll tone driving much of the humour it does largely centre around fairly predictable gags, and while the actors turn in some wonderful performances they feel very much for the benefit of a camera - not staged as such, but not entirely naturalistic. While the ending is a fantastic piece of closure, both final and enigmatic, it feels the tiniest bit forced; some may feel the film edges too far into 'family-friendly' territory.

Nonetheless, this is a hugely entertaining film and a neglected gem that deserves a lot more exposure. As long as the viewer can at least [b]tolerate[/b] Peking opera (though sadly this is more than likely to alienate many) the universal themes (family, belonging and the fine art of friendship) are brought together with enough subtlety, intricate plotting and deft direction to appeal to a very wide audience. Professionally shot and scored with rarely any wasted moments, it's a crisp, tightly written hundred-odd minutes that comes highly recommended.