Film and Risk

Multinational Casts and Epistemic Risk: The Case of Pan-Asian Cinema

165 jinhee choi Multinational Casts and Epistemic Risk The Case of Pan-Asian Cinema In Chen Kaige’s The Promise (2005), Asian audiences see odd interactions among a multinational cast, free from language barriers and unbound by national identities. Set in a mythic space, the film depicts the entangled romances of the slave Kunlun (played by Korean actor Jang Dong-gun), General Guangming (Sanada Hiroyuki from Japan), and Duke Wuhuan (Nicholas Tse from Hong Kong), all of whom pursue Princess Qingcheng (Hong Kong actress Cecilia Cheung). The film Initial D (dir. Andy Lau and Alan Mak, 2005), a Hong Kong adaptation of a Japanese manga/anime, features the Japanese actress Ann Suzuki as Natsuki, dubbed into Cantonese. The Korean actor Ji Jin-hee speaks in Mandarin to portray the character Monty in the musical Perhaps Love (dir. Peter Chan, 2005). The Myth (dir. Stanley Tong, 2005) and Seven Swords (dir. Tsui Hark, 2005) showcase casts of actors from various countries—Hong Kong, India, and South Korea. All these films are examples of a significant production trend throughout the region: pan-Asian cinema. Multinational casting has been a production strategy found in both European art cinema and genre quickies made in Canada and New Zealand, as a result of coproduction and/or with the aim to attract audiences across national borders. Some of the most renowned European art cinema directors , such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Luchino Visconti, created films with multinational casts—The Eclipse (1962), Rocco and His Brothers (1960), and The Leopard (1963), to name a few—that are products of French and Italian partnerships. Darrell Davis and Emilie Yeh view a coproduction trend in East Asia as emerging out of necessity, that is, as a way for Asian producers and filmmakers to resuscitate the regional film industry. The 166 Jinhee Choi declining industries in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan demanded a means to recapture the hearts of local audiences and expand potential markets with films of high entertainment value and stars with broad appeal. As a coproduction between South Korea (Show East) and China (21st Century Shengkai Film, China Film Group, Capgen Investment Group), The Promise was China’s most expensive film to date, with production costs reaching $35 million, but with grosses totaling only $18 million in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and $650,000 in Hong Kong. A distribution deal with the Weinstein Company fell through, and the stateside box office results ($660,000) were rather tepid in comparison to previously released swordplay films such as Hero ($53.3 million) and House of Flying Daggers ($11.1 million). The industry discourse on such high-budget films as The Promise often focuses on the economic necessity and benefits of shifting target audiences/markets from the local to the regional and global. But to what extent does this trend of pan-Asian cinema—as an attempt to manage financial risk within an increasingly globalized film industry— involve and ignore immanent epistemic risk? A reviewer for Variety predicted a reception gap between ethnic Chinese and non-Chinese audiences for The Promise: “Although non-Asian audiences will be unaffected by the multinational casting of stars Sanada and Jang . . . Mandarin-speaking audiences have been loudly critical of non-Chinese actors’ accents.” Should the multinational casts’ imperfect command of Mandarin be considered a concession to regional audiences, a marker in a number of “me-too” coproduction swordplay films to emerge after the strong North American box office draws of such films as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (dir. Ang Lee, 2000) and Hero (dir. Zhang Yimou, 2002)? Is this an inevitable yet bearable consequence, given the ambitions of regional filmmakers to create a self-sustaining pan-Asian film market? Or do the multinational casts bring to the fore some of the epistemic and aesthetic risks resulting from multinational coproductions? In this chapter, I explore the epistemic risk involved in films with multinational casts. To what extent does pretend communication among multinational casts affect the audiences’ aesthetic engagement with film? To what extent does such a practice create epistemic conditions under which audiences with cultural knowledge depreciate the aesthetic value of a work? The issue of epistemology here concerns the relationship between an artwork and its audience, the conditions under which audiences assess and appreciate a work. The concept of risk—borrowed and refashioned from sociology—underscores the probability, rather than the truth claim, the latter being the concern of philosophical epistemology. Sociologists such as Ulrich Beck...