Actress gets comfortable with directing in new feature
Jinglei Xu, the award-winning Chinese director came to USC for a screening and Q&A session of her new film Go Lala Go!, at The Ray Stark Family Theatre on Friday. The theater was filled by Xu’s fans and there were still more trying to get into the event.
Xu, who has been known as a “cai nv,” or talented woman in China, started out as an actress before moving behind the camera to make films. She is also the chief editor of the biweekly electric magazine, Kaila, which focuses on fashion and culture in everything from film and television to current events.
Go Lala Go! won the Golden Angel Award for outstanding film in the sixth Chinese American Festival in Los Angeles on Oct. 28 2010. This is also Xu’s first mainstream film.
The film adapts the popular novel, Du Lala’s Promotion. Xu, who also stars in the movie, said she chose to adapt this novel because she wanted to try something fun and make a different film than her former works, and the novel just matched her will.
The film is about Du Lala (Xu) who gets a job at a foreign company as a white collar secretary and works her way to success. Along the way, she falls in love with the sales director of the company, Wang Wei (Stanley Huang), during the company trip to Thailand.
The only catch is that romance between co-workers is banned at the company. Soon, Lala has to keep her boss Rose (Karen Mok) from finding out about her affair, as well as figure out what is going on between Rose and Wei.
The film is overflowing with eye-catching elements, from the brightly colored designer clothes to the overwhelming advertisements. During the screening, audience members enjoyed the job of picking up every notable advertisement in the film.
The Chinese media was critical of the film, saying that the abundance of advertisements not only distracted audience attention from the film but also hurt the film’s creditability. Xu noticed the problem as well, commenting on it during the Q&A session.
“I think advertisements have both positive and negative influences to the film,” she said. “It represents the reality in Beijing. You see advertisements everywhere around the city, so instead of using [the] computer to erase those advertisements on screen, I think we can use them. So our team made contracts with a great number of advertisement investment, and it seemed out of control at the end.”
Go Lala Go! is Xu’s fourth film. Although it was clear in Go Lala Go! that she is a capable director, she revealed that it wasn’t always the case. She took a moment to talk about her first directorial outing.
“When I directed my first film, especially for the first three days, I felt the director chair is not for me,” Xu said. “I liked photography, and I thought I knew what was going on of film shooting, but it was totally different from my thought.”
The romantic story in the film caused audiences to ask about Xu’s own romantic plans. She said that she has no plan for a relationship yet.
One aspect the film touched on was that the character of Du Lala, and Xu in real life, represent a new trend of Asian women’s value on marriage. Compared to the traditional Asian value, which encourages women to stay at home, the women, real and and fiction, show a focus on achieving the high education and the managing level job.
More and more Asian women go to business school in both their home countries and abroad, desiring to control their own life by making high achievement in their career.
At the end of the Q&A, Xu revealed that she felt that she did not do well enough on Go Lala Go! She would like to try directing another mainstream film next time, and she plans on making a film centered around an investment bank.