DANIEL HENNEY IN SHANGHAI CALLING

Global business and (a little) romance in the new China

Shanghai Calling is a niche movie with an advertising subtext. It's geared to young Asian Americans, and maybe young Chinese interested in foreign visitors. It also makes the new urban China, the Shanghai version, anyway, look so sleek and elegant it's like a young corporate exec's wet dream. This seems like a slicker more sitcom-ish knockoff of David Henry Huang's 2011 Broadway play, Chinglish lacking Huang's focus on the linguistic aspects of cultural misunderstandings. Huang was trying to consider some universal issues, but Hsia is more content with keeping us pleasantly distracted for ninety minutes. Maybe an offshoot will be to get the suave Daniel Henney, a Korean-American model and TV actor who's the centerpiece here, some more mainstream opportunities, which he clearly deserves.

Hsia's plot follows Sam Chao (Henney), a crack (but pretty arrogant) young New York Chinese-American corporate lawyer, when he's sent to Shanghai because he's "Chinese" (only "technically," he says: he boasts he's "never been above 79th Street") to land a lucrative contact with a cellphone manufacturer with a cool transparent touch-sensitive model. He does this because he wants to become a partner in his firm. But he messes up when a rival starts manufacturing the phone, and in typical Chinese fashion has it out selling in shops seemingly in a matter of hours. Sam must save his livelihood. Overconfident, but really a fish out of water -- he understands Chinese, some anyway, but cannot speak (of course the actor is Koreaan!) -- Sam must accept the help of a new circle of local acquaintances, two of the female ones hoping to become more than that. Thus we meet Fang Fang (Zhu Zhu), Sam's eager and pretty young Shanghai office assistant; "Awesome" Wang (comedian Geng Le), a journalist and all-purpose fixer; Amanda (Eliza Coupe), a relocation specialist for new arrivals and single mom; Brad (Sean Gallagher), a randy American English teacher; and Donald (Bill Paxton), a fried-chicken entrepreneur and leading figure of the imaginary local expat community known as Americatown. Those three Americans, as well as a British actor met along the way, are fluent in Chinese, as is Amand'a little girl.

Sam, who is so sculpted and cool any ladies or gay men might like him as an ornament in their dining or bedroom, isn't a businessman like the Chinglish protagonist, but he too encounters misunderstanding and romance. He gets embroiled in a confused copywright-entitlement case and meets up with a lawyer who's really not one; an Asian and a Caucasian woman who're enamored of him; a tyke he bonds with aiding romance with her mother. David Henry Huang's play lacked depth in its characterizations (except for one woman) but unfolded with a clarity (Ben Brantley called it like the panels of a comic strip) that helped us steer though a morass of long Chinese speeches translated in SuperTitles and cultural misunderstandings. Sam gets through his more quickly -- or just ignores them. He indeed is just "technically" Chinese. Henney is engaging and well cast as well as easy on the eyes; everything here is easy on the eyes: the images are cool and beautiful if a bit generic. The action feels like TV sitcom material throughout with an exotic gloss.

Sometimes the dialogue has contemporaneity and perfect pitch, as when Sam catches one of his adversaries, the poseur lawyer, the latter asks him how he did it on the beat-up bike he grabbed for the chase and Sam replies, "Doing Spinners three days a week, bitch." Moreover the real Chinese accoutrements -- we enter what seems like an actual factory producing what looks like the transparent touch phone; there are many glittering Shanghai panoramas; Sam's new apartment is a gleaming dazzler with fabulous views -- all have a global-corporate gloss that Huang's old-fashioned play setups and revolving stage didn't have. If you really want to see the new China, however, you want to try a filmmaker with a keener eye and more to say, like Jia Zhang-ke. None of this superficially entertaining and forgettable stuff is worth five minutes of Jia or Wong Kar-wai.

Shanghai Calling, 98min., debuted at newport Beach and showed at several film festivals in 2012 and opened in China 10 Aug. 2012. I opened in US theaters 8 and 15 Feb. 2013.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.