Zhang Yang is a director who I thought is worth paying attention to ever since I’ve seen Paths of the Soul and this one in particular seems to have extra cachet in the West. It’s also a very unusual film that is difficult to judge and it purports to tell the real story of Chinese actor Jia Hongsheng while starring the actor himself as well as his real family members playing themselves.

Hongsheng was a decently successful young actor in the late 1980s and early 1990s but dropped out of the scene after he developed a drug habit. This film supposedly reenacts those events with the cooperation of Hongsheng and his family members, supplemented by interviews in which they speak directly to the director. It details how his father decided to retire early so that his parents could move in with him and his sister in their shared apartment in Beijing so as to better take care of him. Despite not having an income and living off of his sister’s salary, Hongsheng is ungrateful and behaves atrociously towards his parents. When his parents convince him to leave the room, he spends his daydreaming and becomes convinced that he is the son of John Lennon who he idolizes. Flashbacks reveal how colleagues in the film industry introduced him to marijuana as well as how he spent four drug-addled years lazing around in the apartment, accompanied occasionally by other creative people who he invites to stay with him.

By its very nature, this is an incredibly fascinating project and it’s well-made as well. Hongsheng and his parents are all good performers and if his sister is weaker at acting, at least her role is a more minor one. I’m uncertain if his friends and colleagues are also real people playing themselves but it all adds up to a remarkably candid confession. The social stigma for being a drug user in China is considerable and the awful manner that he treats his parents is doubly shocking when one is led to believe that it is all true. Then there is the fact that while this film was made in 2001 when Hongsheng was supposed to have fully recovered from his addiction after spending a year in a mental institution and had become an active actor again, it turned out not to be the end of the story. He committed suicide in 2010 and this can’t help but add poignancy to the story.

It’s also difficult to determine how much of his obsession with John Lennon is just an affectation or whether he actually is insane. Even as his parents assure him that he really is their son, he continues to wonder if there is perhaps a European somewhere in his family tree. The film depicts him as an incredibly vain person who can hardly believe that he was born to a father who looks like a peasant. On the other hand, despite being known as film about an addict trying to quit his habit, the film is very light on drug culture, there are few shots of him actually shooting up and no indication of what his withdrawal symptoms are. This looks more like a biography of a very troubled artiste but even so some details seem missing. For example, his life as shown here  points to him not having any sexuality at all which is patently untrue. I think it’s a good sign that the film is a version of the truth but shouldn’t be seen as the full story and it’s fair to assume that the director worked with Hongsheng and his family to craft a specific narrative that would make for a better film.

Overall this is a highly engaging biography of a unique and interesting personality. He isn’t at all likable nor does he readily invite sympathy but I suppose it does make for a rather good portrait of an ethereal, dreamer type of personality who cannot live in the real world. One of the most incisive scenes is when he is lazing on the grass and can’t help but shout insults at passing pedestrians who are going about what he sees as meaningless lives. At the same time, the very uniqueness of his personality and situation means that his particular experience can’t really be generalized to fit other drug users.