Have a Nice Day (2017)

A city in southern China and a bag containing a million yuan draws several people from diverse backgrounds with different personal motives into a bloody conflict. Philosophising gangster bosses, ageing hitmen, men and women who are tired of the struggle to survive – anyone who happens to have the bag holds on to it tightly, as if it were a lifeline. Hao ji le is a black comedy; the film’s inscrutable, laconic humour holds up a magnifying glass to attitudes to life and social conditions. Humankind’s constant greed meets a deeply insecure country in transition. The reduced realism of the film’s animated tableau heightens and stylises the mood in today’s China, caught between stasis and a new beginning. The protagonists of this macabre dance wander, strangely lost, through precisely drawn but radically changing cityscapes. The signs and symbols of capitalism impose themselves everywhere, but most people are excluded from the life these signs promise. And Mao Zedong’s image still graces the banknotes.