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"Reverse Life" takes the middle-aged programmer Gao Zhilei (played by Xu Zheng) as the protagonist. It tells the story of how he switched to become a delivery man in the face of the pressure of life after suffering the blow of layoffs in a large Internet company, and gradually regained his faith and courage in the hardships of work and life.

Although it also belongs to the category of "midlife crisis", compared with the "囧" series directed by Xu Zheng before, "Reverse Life" shows a new style, with more delicate insight and portrayal of the situation of ordinary people.

As a realistic film, "Reverse Life" sparked widespread public discussion before its release because it focused on the food delivery industry. The film also fell into a public opinion crisis because the plot setting was not from the perspective of an ordinary food delivery worker, but from the perspective of a fallen elite who had to become a food delivery worker. Many comments predicted the plot based on promotional materials alone, labeling the film as "glorifying suffering", "the rich consuming the poor", and "forced happy ending". In the three days since its release, some comments have pointed out that "Reverse Life" is not a critical realist work. Although it reflects the tenacity of ordinary people in the face of the pressure of life, points out that family is more important than a house, and there are no illusory castles in the air, it avoids deeper structural problems in the industry.

Nowadays, it is becoming increasingly difficult to present the living conditions of ordinary workers in film and television works. The film's handling of this aspect deserves recognition. Today's film review places the film in the series of Xu Zheng's works for comparative interpretation, and sorts out the changes in Xu Zheng's creation over the past decade as a commercial film director with box office appeal.

The multiple transformations of the healing journey

Before the release of "Reverse Life", in addition to co-directing the creation of the trilogy of "My People, My Country", "My People, My Homeland" and "My Fathers and Me", Xu Zheng independently directed three films, namely "Lost in Thailand" (hereinafter referred to as "Lost in Thailand"), "Lost in Hong Kong" and "Lost in Russia". These three films are highly consistent in form and core. Their protagonists are all set as middle-aged men with considerable career achievements. By letting them experience a tortuous journey, showing their process from stubbornness to frustration, and then to awakening and transformation, this explores the spiritual dilemma and life crisis faced by urban groups represented by the "new middle class", and attempts to complete the cultural function of "screwball comedy" to bridge class differences.

In 2012, Xu Zheng, who had been exploring the road of film and television acting for many years, released his first film "Lost in Thailand", which he wrote, directed and starred in. This work not only continued the road comedy mode of the film "Lost on Journey" in which he starred in 2010, but also referred to the previous work and used the Internet term "囧" as the core creative concept, setting the dual dilemma of the characters' real life and inner world as the cultural basis of the film. Through the strong contrast between the calculating businessman Xu Lang and the simple and kind tourist Wang Bao, the film explores the relationship between material and spirit, wealth and emotion.

"Lost in Thailand" brought a refreshing viewing experience to the audience with its novel audio-visual presentation, sophisticated genre narrative and dense comedy settings. The film eventually broke the box office record of domestic films that year with a box office of 1.267 billion yuan, becoming a phenomenal film of the year. Xu Zheng also became the first film director in the mainland to break the 1 billion box office.

Stills from the movie "Lost in Thailand".

With the huge market returns and word-of-mouth recognition of "Lost in Thailand", Xu Zheng successively launched the directorial works "Lost in Hong Kong" and "Lost in Russia" in 2015 and 2020, striving to create the golden signboard of the "Lost" series. These two films use the narrative framework and genre elements of "road + comedy", and move the external space of the film from Thailand to Hong Kong and Russia respectively, hoping to continue the commercial box office success of "Lost in Thailand" with a tighter narrative rhythm, more impactful visual wonders and more crazy comedy plots.

However, the superficial plot routines, overloaded sensory stimulation and unbalanced comedy segments have largely eliminated the serious value expression, making "Lost in Hong Kong" and "Lost in Russia" become rough and unrealistic castles in the air. Rather than a scalpel that dissects the truth of life, they are more like a hypocritical song of resentment, giving an emotional massage to the audience who are troubled by the urban maze.

Although the "囧" series all use the journey of escaping from the existing life as the starting point of the story, rather than saying that they are road movies that are rebellious and resist order, these three movies should be seen as "healing travel movies" that return to warmth. Film scholar Li Bin once pointed out in the article "Type Identification and Value Analysis of "Healing Travel Movies"" that healing travel movies often "use 'road', journey, and 'journey' as coding modes, set the protagonist as a modern person with a certain 'morbidity' and personality defects, use the road to metaphorize life, and reflect the growth and changes of the protagonist within the mainstream value system. The genre film uses the journey story to heal the pain, complete mental treatment, and obtain spiritual salvation."

The "囧" series of films directed by Xu Zheng (including "Lost on Journey") all use returning to the family as the ultimate antidote for the protagonist to resolve the spiritual crisis and get out of the predicament of life, and violently complete the imaginary solution of all contradictions with a happy ending of love. It can be said that although the birth of the "囧" series benefited from the Internet culture, it is gradually moving away from the real Internet thinking.

Compared with his own directorial work "囧" series, the films "I Am Not a God of Medicine" and "Love Mythology", which Xu Zheng participated in the production of in 2018 and 2021 respectively, have reached a higher level in humanistic expression and artistic quality. The former takes severe medical problems as the starting point and sharply portrays the grassroots reality of China; the latter follows the narrative form of life flow and accurately outlines the complex and fragmented life of contemporary people.

Although Xu Zheng once said in an interview that his role as a producer was more of a service job, such as providing advice on the script, tone, and actors, or using his personal influence to increase the film's attention during the publicity and promotion stage, there is no doubt that his long-term collaboration with young directors of different types will inevitably provide Xu Zheng with more diverse perspectives and concepts for his later creations.

It is obvious that after incorporating a serious examination of reality, "Reverse Life" has broken away from the creative logic of the "囧" series, which is fundamentally aimed at alleviating the anxiety of the middle class. Although the protagonist of the film, Gao Zhilei, is like the protagonist of the "囧" series, he longs to regain the good life he longs for in his heart, and for this reason he does not hesitate to use endless "riding" to resist the blows of life, but the film still largely transcends the single clue of healing as the value orientation, and no longer uses irrelevant laughter and anger to cover up the cruelty of life itself. From this perspective, "Reverse Life" has completed Xu Zheng's rebellion and "running away" from himself.

The concrete expression of "class slide"

If we say that the "囧" series that came out more than a decade ago fit the mentality of a large number of audiences because it cleverly integrated the rapid development of China's economy, the growth of the middle class and the rise of Internet culture, and was the first to grasp the themes of "midlife crisis" and "middle-class anxiety", then "Reverse Life" boldly took the social hot issues in recent years such as the intensified competition in the job market, frequent salary cuts and layoffs, and the increasing degree of social involution as entry points, upgrading "class anxiety" to "class slippage", a more contemporary narrative theme, revealing the director's ambition to write about reality.

The film begins with a family drama that takes place indoors. With the help of art settings and character performances that fit life, it concisely and efficiently outlines the living conditions of an urban middle-class family: a wife who quits her job to become a full-time housewife, parents who sell their old house and live with their children, a daughter who is about to go to an international school, and Gao Zhilei who works hard to support all of this.

Stills from the movie "Reverse Life".

Even though the harmonious family relationship and smooth dialogue make the scene of a family having breakfast seem ordinary and warm, the dim tone, cold lighting and cramped camera space have already foreshadowed that this "beautiful-looking" scene is in danger of breaking. This audio-visual style established at the beginning also runs through the entire film, which is completely opposite to the bright and gorgeous image tone in Xu Zheng's previous works.

Then, as Gao Zhilei rushed to the company, the film used irregular camera movements, fast editing rhythm, strong contrast between light and dark, and depth of field shots with complex information to depict a crowded, dim, cage-like urban landscape. Gao Zhilei, with a frown on his face, was like a screw on an assembly line, shuttling along a predetermined route through congested roads, subways, and office buildings until he arrived at the noisy office lobby, as if he would be swallowed up by the dense flow of people if he was a second slower.

In "Reverse Life", the city is neither presented as a distant "other" in the form of a consumer spectacle, nor does it have the urban style and local interest in films such as "Sunset Street" and "Shower". It is cold, depressing, and homogenized, squeezing the characters' spiritual world and emotional space day after day.

After the previous visual foreshadowing, "Reverse Life" then uses a very short space to complete the narrative of Gao Zhilei's layoff. As his wish to return to the programmer industry was completely dashed, his father's stroke and hospitalization, long-term mortgage arrears, and his daughter's tuition fees were not paid, one after another, leaving no room for Gao Zhilei to vent his emotions.

As a symbol of modernization, the city can give people a beautiful promise of class advancement with relatively stable rules and order, but it can also easily drag tiny individuals into a vortex from which they are difficult to escape. Gao Zhilei, who was exiled by the city machine, is facing not only the exit and reconstruction of middle-class life, but also the destruction and maintenance of male dignity. He is eager to find his identity and position in this "forest of steel" as soon as possible to prevent the collapse of his life.

Anthropologist Hadas Weiss once said in his book We Have Never Been Middle Class that the middle class is inherently an unstable identity, "What unites the middle class is not prosperity, but lingering insecurity, debt assets and forced overwork." The famous American sociologist C. Wright Mills believes that in the so-called post-industrial society, most of the "new middle class" do not have their own independent property, and they work more as employees for people with large capital.

"White Collar: America's Middle Class", by C. Wright Mills, translated by Zhou Xiaohong, Nanjing University Press, June 2016.

Correspondingly, the first twenty minutes of the film revolve around the layoffs, using a high-intensity narrative rhythm to present the theme of "class slide" in a concrete way, with the clear purpose of telling the audience: the construction of the middle class may require an extremely complicated process, but its fall only requires an unexpected accident.

Faced with huge economic pressure, Gao Zhilei, who is desperate, rides a modified electric bike under the enthusiastic recommendation of the young food deliveryman Yang Dashan and joins the huge professional group of food delivery riders. In order to strike a balance between commercial genre and theme expression and increase the dramatic conflict of the film, Gao Zhilei's food delivery job is set as a level-by-level mode. He needs to master this extremely hard and demanding job, and also needs to overcome the psychological gap from the middle-level of an Internet giant to an ordinary food delivery rider.

From being unfamiliar with the system rules and having no idea of ​​the delivery routes to being familiar with the food delivery mechanism and city roads, from frequent conflicts with customers and constant bad reviews to getting along well with colleagues and merchants and achieving rising performance, Gao Zhilei faces one challenge after another in order to make up for the family expenses of more than 20,000 yuan each month and curb the speed of his life's decline.

However, this long process of growth does not give people the same exhilarating feeling as the "cool narrative" of "killing monsters and leveling up". On the contrary, the characters' slight victories gained by enduring heavy pain can make the audience feel more real pain. In a scene where Gao Zhilei fainted on the roadside due to hypoglycemia, as the characters failed to conduct "smile photo verification" again and again, the movie implicitly hinted to us that the dream of "warm return" may never be realized in this movie.

The path of life going backwards

Today, the food delivery industry has become an indispensable and important part of China's urban system. According to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics, as of the end of 2021, there were 200 million flexible workers in China, including 13 million food delivery riders. According to statistics from Meituan, in 2018, Meituan had 2.7 million riders, and in 2022 and 2023, this number reached 6.24 million and 7 million respectively. As the total number of food delivery workers increases year by year, the food delivery industry has also begun to suffer from the impact of staff saturation. For food delivery riders, if they want to maintain their previous income, they must work harder than before.

Stills from the movie "Reverse Life".

Through Gao Zhilei's index, "Reverse Life" uses characters such as Lao Kou, Dahei, Yang Dashan, and Qiu Xiaomin to meticulously depict the current common living conditions of deliverymen. This also allows the film to gradually transcend the narrative perspective of the middle class as the plot progresses, extending humanistic care to more people on the edge of the city who are facing survival difficulties.

Similar to programmers who are controlled by the human resources system, the work mode and work value of food delivery riders are also controlled by a set of cold algorithms, which also makes countless food delivery riders have to face the cruel situation of increasing competitive pressure. However, in order to get out of the predicament of life as soon as possible, Lao Kou, Da Hei and others can only choose to endure all the pain and injustice. Even if they reach the edge of emotional collapse, they can only say helplessly, "I'm too tired, I need to rest."

Although "Life Against the Current", which strives to present a comprehensive portrayal of the deliveryman's profession, often presents a texture close to reality, in order to achieve a typified narrative effect and arouse the greatest emotional resonance, the film still has problems such as exaggeration and distortion in the setting of many characters and storylines.

Stills from the movie "Reverse Life".

For example, the scene of the riders getting into car accidents on the way to deliver food appears many times. Even though this is the most direct manifestation of the high-risk nature of the food delivery profession, this approach is also suspected of deliberately increasing the twists and turns of the story and the tragedy of the characters. For another example, in order to show the smooth delivery work of Gao Zhilei and the improvement of his family's situation, the character's long-term diabetes has been greatly improved during the high-pressure food delivery job.

Throughout the film, it is not difficult to see that Xu Zheng, who has been engaged in comedy creation for a long time, has been extremely restrained in inserting comedic elements in order to maintain the seriousness of the theme expression. However, the reliance on dramatic narrative mode still makes it inevitable that the film deviates from the real logic of life and falls into the rut of melodrama.

Furthermore, although "Reverse Life" focuses on the hardships of the food delivery industry and deeply reflects on the development of urban modernization, the film does not touch on deeper social structural problems. In other words, although Gao Zhilei re-establishes his self-worth in his day-to-day food delivery work and begins to face the challenges of life with his family with a good attitude, the premise of all this is based on the rationality of the character's default "algorithm".

Gao Zhilei's personal efforts to reverse the situation by increasing the delivery time, improving the delivery speed, staying up late to develop the "Lulutong" applet, etc., seem to be just jumping from one vicious circle to another. People are domesticated into machines by algorithms. Compared with whether the external environment and mechanism are reasonable, the characters in the movie are more concerned about whether their "riding speed" can be faster. What is the reason that causes everyone to enter this involutionary game, and how can we jump out of this vicious circle? The film's realistic expression obviously fails to reach this level.

Stills from the movie "Reverse Life".

At the end of "Reverse Life", Gao Zhilei, who has become the monthly "order king" (the number one takeaway station in terms of food delivery), still moved out of the house that was struggling to support him and happily moved into a lower-cost old-fashioned community with his family. The ending where Gao Zhilei was noticed by other Internet company executives seemed to be just to reconcile the film's low and depressing overall atmosphere, and did not make any real promises for the character's future.

It is worth affirming that the value expression of "Reverse Life" does not stop at the traditional concept of "personal efforts to overcome all difficulties". It wants to tell us that in today's rapidly changing world, simply relying on "going against the flow" at full speed does not mean that you can find the right path in life. Only by transcending the cognition of material, interest, and class as the single value standard, and then achieving a self-consistent and open state of life, can you start a new journey of life.

Written by Chen Lin

Editor/Lotus

Proofreading/Lu Xi