Boy meets world

By Raymond Zhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-11-20 08:11

Tan Jianci is a dancer by training. The only scene that required him to dance in Lost, Indulgence posed a challenge: He had to move so badly that no trace of his grace and dexterity remained.

Lost, Indulgence is the 18-year-old's only film. He was 17 when it was shot last year in the hilly city of Chongqing. The scene involves him dancing to the music his father was listening to while his taxi rolled into a river.

It was set up to be the teenage son's expression of sadness at his dad's death and his frustration at being unable to track down the real cause of the accident, accentuated by the possible motive of showing off to a woman he has a growing affection for.

Tan complained about the slow tempo of the song, which was playing in the background. Once it was switched to a dance mix, Tan got the feeling and nailed the scene.

This is just one of several showy scenes in Lost, Indulgence, which opened nationwide on Nov 14. Although Tan has the meatiest role in the movie, there is a glittering cast: Jiang Wenli plays his hard-working mom; Eric Tsang has a cameo as his taxi-driver father; Eason Chan is the Hong Kong businessman who gets into a strange friendship with the mom, and Karen Mok is the mysterious woman who turns the family upside down.

"It was a learning experience," says Tan, whose character Xiao Chuan is caught in a vortex of conflicting emotions.

Tan was impressed with Jiang's attention to small details that she improvised during scenes.

"She would do something with her hair while talking to me, which added naturalness to a simple conversation between mother and son," Tan says.

Mok, the Hong Kong veteran, would remind him of the importance of blocking: "'Don't show the back of your head to the camera. It's your face that sells,' she would say, as I would be totally lost in the action and forget where I was in relation to the camera and other actors."

Director Zhang Yibai had a special way of preparing the freshman for his second Chongqing-based suspense-mystery movie, following Curiosity Kills a Cat in 2006. He did not tell Tan the whole story, but fed him scene by scene. "I knew I was to play an ordinary kid, but I did not know how the story would unfold until the preview," he says.

"I had a hunch by the end of the two-month shooting that something was going on between my character and Karen Mok's. But the director never told me it was an affair between a younger man and an older woman. I had always seen her as my older sister."

During the audition for the part, he was asked to give love notes to an elder sister-type actress, who tore it to pieces. And "I had to come up with different ways to plead with her, but she always gave me a hard time."

As soon as he arrived in Chongqing, director Zhang gave him 50 yuan and told him to go out and have a wild time. "I didn't know where I was in the city, it was getting dark and I was not allowed to take a taxi."

During shooting, Tan was encouraged not to socialize with other cast members. He was addressed by the character's name.

"Gradually I began to feel like Xiao Chuan and empathize with his loneliness and his yearning for human bonding," he says. "Xiao Chuan is miserable. Neither women, the older one played by Mok or a younger classmate, wanted him. He failed his college entrance exam. It was dawning on him that he was not good at anything."

Tan was so immersed in the character the director would adopt some of his natural expressions and responses, the one when he showed his rebelliousness by sitting with Mok in a comfortable position and refusing to acknowledge his mom's arrival.

Asked what Xiao Chuan would do after the movie ends, Tan says he has it mapped out: Xiao Chuan would give up his dream for college, take up a job as a courier (not a taxi driver) and get married. His wife would be of his own age.

"He has outgrown calf love and falling for the elder sister type," Tan reasons.

There's another reason Tan regards Xiao Chuan as a failure: almost every other character in the movie beat him up. And as the actor playing the part, Tan got bruises, too.

"I thought movie fighting was fake but I was taken to the hospital when shooting the scene where my head was banged on the cement by my buddy," he recalls.

Still, the acting bug got to him: "I want to act," he enthuses. "It is such a fantastic job. It gives me the chance to get into someone else's body and live like that person for a while."

The kind of movie that most attracts him would feature pop idols who sing and dance. At the tender age of 4, Tan saw a clip of Michael Jackson doing the moonwalk, surrounded by tens of thousands of screaming fans. The boy collected every disc of the "King of Pop" in concert. By age 7, he was having dance lessons and at 13 enrolled at the Beijing Dance Academy.

Nowadays the adolescent is taking part in a training program organized by the entertainment company Taihe Rye Music. His daily routine includes six hours of dance lessons, one vocal lesson and an acting lesson every Saturday. He feels he is natural at acting.

He is good at doing impressions and demonstrated his skill by imitating co-stars Mok and Tsang. He also showed his ingenuity by developing a one-sentence direction from his acting coach into a mini-play, which portrayed the life of an old man, continuing with his after-life and even what happened after his reincarnation.

"I'm shy by nature. I'll never participate in one of those (reality) television contests where I'm judged by those around me and face being kicked out every minute," he revealed. "I wanna be a superstar, either doing hip-hop or winning awards like Tony Leung."

Will the lightning of good luck strike again? With more maturity and better preparation, Tan feels anything is possible. He believes in the saying: "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity and boy meets acting world."