Starring: Jackson Yee, Tian Yu, Chen Halin, Zhang Yu, Eric Wang, Yang Xinming, Qi Xi, Gong Lei, Zhang Xiran Director: Wen Muye Lin Lin linlin_szdaily@126.com “NICE View” is a celebration of love, friendship and the grit of ordinary people.It carries the kind of warmth that can be found in family photos or pictures of close friends. Jing Hao (Jackson Yee), 20 years old, runs a small cell phone repair shop and leads a meager life with his 6-year-old sister who suffers a congenital heart disease. To earn the money needed for the little girl’s expensive heart surgery, Jing takes a risk on a batch of defective cell phones with a bold attempt to disassemble them into certified electronic parts within a limited time period. Set in Shenzhen in 2013, the movie tells the story of how a penniless young man fights his way to becoming a promising entrepreneur. Instead of depicting a cruel business world and how the hero tackles the complexities often found in such a world, the movie revolves around the care and love Jing gives to his sister, his desperate grip on the only chance available to cure his sister and the support he receives on his quest to accomplish his task. The opening scene, set in a small apartment in an urban village, is a detailed portrait of the daily life of Jing and his sister Tongtong (Chen Halin). We see Jing preparing their breakfast, tying up Tongtong’s hair and sending her to school. The scene sets the warm, hopeful tone for the movie, and the little girl is so lovely that she immediately captures your heart and includes you in the story. The lively and warm mood continues to flow as we follow Jing and Tongtong as they go from urban village buildings to iconic skyscrapers in Shenzhen, and meet the avuncular Uncle Liang (Tian Yu), a worker in a small nursing home, Grandpa Zhong (Gong Jinguo), a veteran who loves watching TV drama, and Grandpa Sun (Tian Zhuangzhuang), the taciturn gatekeeper of Tongtong’s school. All of them, like many other characters to show up later in the movie, offer great support and friendship to Jing when he is in trouble. The movie’s director Wen Muye is known for his feature debut “Dying to Survive,” a theatrical hit in 2018 with a gross box office revenue of 3.1 billion yuan （US$489 million), which portrays realistic work that brought people’s attention to leukemia patients overburdened with high medical costs. In “Nice View,” Wen continues to tell the stories of people who’re often neglected. When Jing looks for workers to help him disassemble the defective phones, he hits the local job market and ends up with people who’re least wanted by employers — Wang Chunmei (Qi Xi), a woman who often causes trouble because her hearing was damaged in her previous job, Zhang Longhao (Gong Lei), a man who has been released from prison and is discriminated against in the job market, and two young men addicted to computer games. As they gather in Jing’s factory, they become members of a family who understand and help each other. Each with distinctive characteristics (such as Wang’s bluntness and Zhang’s amusing melancholy), these supporting characters also create most of the laughs in the movie. Released on the first day of Spring Festival holiday, the movie had raked in more than 1.1 billion yuan in box office as of midnight Thursday. It has the warmth and comedy that people want for the most important festival of the year. However, as a story where the protagonist goes through a series of events that lead him to a big success, the movie lacks a real crisis that people expect in such a story, a moment in which the protagonist loses everything but manages to find hopes in a desperate situation. That also dims the emotional power of the scene when Jing’s employees offer to work for free to help him deliver the order that’ll earn enough money for his sister’s surgery in time. Another problem of the movie is the overuse of slow motion and emotional background music. Both of the strategies aim to heighten the warm, sad and other dramatic feelings in the audience, but too much of it just leads to plain sentimentality in some scenes. The movie is now being screened in Shenzhen. | 