Fan Bingbing returns to the big screen with Green Night

The Chinese movie star Fan Bingbing was at the peak of her career back in 2018 when all of a sudden, she disappeared for months. The mystery was solved when she re-appeared, apologizing to the Chinese government for failing to pay millions of dollars in taxes. 

After years out of the public eye, she's back in the spotlight with a new film, Green Night, which follows a Chinese immigrant who meets a young woman while working at the airport in Seoul. Soon after, they venture into South Korea's underworld in search of a way to free themselves from their current lives.

Today on Commotion, film critic Rachel Ho tells host Elamin Abdelmahmoud why she thinks the movie is proof that Fan Bingbing will never work in China again.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: For anyone who's not familiar with Fan Bingbing, what do you think made her so famous?

Rachel: She's honestly kind of like a factory-made superstar. She's immensely talented. She's genuinely a great actress. She is beautiful. She is very well-spoken. She's personable. She says the right thing at the right time to the right people every single step of her career, it feels like. I feel like she's just the prototype to what any publicist, any studio would want to have as their crown jewel in their system. It's almost impossible to find a Western counterpart to her. I thought Tom Cruise, maybe…. But that's not even, to me, very comparable.

She had her really big breakthrough in 2003 in a movie called Cell Phone. She was massive. She was, like, the best-paid actor of all of the entertainers. She dominated the endorsements, the Chinese entertainment industry. And given their stronghold, you could make an argument to say she was the biggest star in the world. She did appear in some Hollywood films; not too many, but she's been in some. But Chinese cinema was Fan Bingbing for a really long time.

Elamin: OK, but movie stars like Tom Cruise, if that's the analogy you're making — and you're saying that doesn't even quite capture it — they don't just disappear. So can you just run us through why she disappeared?

Rachel: It's a wild story to me. So, she got dinged for tax evasion…. What she did is not unheard of, apparently; basically every wealthy Chinese person was doing it. It's kind of like wealthy people in the West going, "I'm going to open a bank account in the Cayman Islands." It's that kind of thing. It's a done thing. She just got caught. And however that happened, who knows, but she got caught. And because of her superstardom, because she has such a huge profile, they have to make an example of her. They can't just skirt her, give her a slap on the wrist and send her on her way.

So the way that it's told, there's a Vanity Fair article that came out…. Sources that were close to Fan said plainclothes cops basically showed up to her house one day, escorted her away, brought her to what they call a residential surveillance designated area — kind of sounds like a high-end prison, like a really fancy spa holiday-prison. But you don't get any privacy. She wasn't allowed to speak to her family [or] her friends. She couldn't make any social media posts. Apparently, she couldn't even take a shower alone. She wasn't given paper and pen. She couldn't do anything while she was gone for those few months. And it was jarring for the public. 

They didn't announce that she was being taken away, of course, but it was this woman who is so prominent in social media, by paparazzi, and then all of a sudden she just wasn't there anymore. I think of Kate Middleton when she disappeared for a few months to get cancer treatment. Everyone lost it. And it was kind of the same thing of where did she go and what happened. And then she returns, and she makes her penance on social media saying, you know, how embarrassed she is, she let down her country, she let down the society's support, the trust that they had in her, all of those things. So it's a really crazy story that could be made into a movie. Probably won't be, but it's pretty crazy.

Elamin: Someone write this movie, that's all I'm saying. But this is not the movie we're talking about today because we're going to talk about Green Night. You've seen her new movie. What do you think?

Rachel: I liked it. It's kind of a noir-ish film. It's about a Chinese immigrant woman living in Seoul, South Korea. She is there by way of [a] spousal visa. Her husband is a real piece of trash, abuses her all the time. We are witness to the abuse that she suffers, and it is implied that this is an ongoing thing, not just a one-off situation. She meets a young girl who is also being abused, but in a different type of relationship, and the two of them kind of go on a revenge thrill, in a sense. 

It's an interesting film. I found it really entertaining. I thought that it talked a lot about, like, good nuance about abuse, the options immigrants have, the options that women have very specifically in that. I don't think every single note particularly hits with this movie, but I do think it's a good film. One thing I found really interesting in it was, like I said, she's there by way of a spousal visa. As a Chinese immigrant in Seoul, she is putting up with all of this horrendous abuse because she doesn't want to get deported back to China. And for somebody like Fan Bingbing to have that messaging in a film, to me it speaks volumes.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Rachel Ho produced by Jess Low.