Occasionally there is a movie which leaves me wondering – just what were the producers trying to achieve? Such is “Chongqing Hot Pot” (2016).
Hot Pot is a popular type of Sichuan cuisine in the city of Chongqing, China. Spoiler alert: a group of three friends in the city run a fairly unsuccessful hot pot restaurant in a cavern under the old city. One of the friends has run up some rather hefty gambling debts to an unforgiving crook, and consequently the friends are trying to raise cash by selling the restaurant – but the potential buyer insists on them first expanding the size of the restaurant.
In digging out an unapproved excavation, they accidentally break into the cash-stuffed vault of a local bank. While the impoverished friends are struggling with temptation, the bank is invaded by a group of robbers intent on accessing that vault. And let’s not forget the unforgiving crook’s gang of low-lifes intent on recovering those gambling debts one way or another; nor the sometimes incompetent police; nor the young woman teller in the bank who had a crush on one of the friends in high school.
Was this intended to be a farce? it certainly has many of the right elements, but there is rather too much blood and violence for a genuine comedic farce. Or possibly was it intended to be a morality tale? But only in a world in which morality is expressed in shades of grey rather than black & white. Or maybe it was intended to be a romance involving the young woman teller? But the producers wisely downplayed that aspect. Or perhaps it was a subtle exposure of the seamier side of life in modern China, where connections trump the rules, schoolgirls are abused by thugs, and the limit of young lads’ aspirations is to follow in the footsteps of Korean boy bands? In the end, the viewer simply has to make up his own mind.
The movie does present some excellent images of modern Chongqing – the stunning bridges over the Yangtse river, the state-of-the-art monorail, the superb urban freeways – as well as graphic images of the crumbling older city.
As a side note, Chongqing (about 900 miles up-river from Shanghai) is the largest city in the world in terms of area, at 32,000 square miles, roughly the size of Austria. By population, it has 32 Million inhabitants, nearly 3 times the Los Angeles metro area. It is interesting that just one city in China – a city most of us could not point out on a map – has a population larger than Denmark, Finland, Norway, & Sweden combined; something which NATO should keep in mind as it picks its next enemy.