By The popularity and critical acclaim that Bong Hoon-Jo’s Parasite received has had a much bigger impact on Asian cinema than I really anticipated. While I do think the film is maybe a touch overhyped, its dissection of class struggle and the lengths people would go to in a broken society to achieve some semblance of success is a story that resonates with a lot of people. It’s not hard to understand why as capitalism is destroying anything resembling normalcy, but I also didn’t realize that practically every movie about class struggles from Asian filmmakers would be an emulation of that film for the next decade or so.
The Escaping Man, which also goes under the title of The Kidnapping, is a film very much in the vein of Parasite. It deals with a woman struggling to make ends meet, a wrongly accused man trying to clear his name, and rich socialites more concerned with prestige than the actual life of their child. It also doesn’t do much else beyond that premise, though some interesting wrinkles came to me a couple of days after I watched this.
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The Escaping Man
Director: Wang Yichun
Release Date: July 26, 2024 (NYAFF)
Country: China
We start The Escaping Man by seeing a man named Shengli (Jiang Wu) being released from prison after serving a 23-year sentence for rape and attempted escape. As he likes to tell the story, he was in a relationship with a young woman named Sia (Zeng Meihuizi) and had her consent, but her mother (Yan Zhao) hated him and told the police it was assault. Shengli is now looking for Sia to either make amends or get revenge: the film isn’t clear upfront.
Sia, on the other hand, has had a pretty lousy life since that incident. She was previously married to an abusive man and is now working as a maid for the ludicrously wealthy. Her current client is a couple by the names of Suen (Yan Ni) and Mao Guangcai (Ren Long). Having made their way up in business by putting on appearances and following every rule, they are disappointed that their son, Fluffy (Zhang Boxin), has seemingly turned out to be mentally disabled. Fluffy has a strong bond with Sia, but he otherwise is very innocent and seemingly doesn’t realize when other kids are mocking him.
Shengli eventually learns the whereabouts of Sia and confronts her by getting a delivery job. While Sia is apprehensive about speaking with him, she tells him that his alleged rape was merely a ploy from her mother and that Sia never had a chance to explain otherwise. Shengli now assumes they are back together, but Sia quickly hatches a plan to capitalize on the situation: they will partner up and kidnap Fluffy so that his parents will fork over a stupidly large sum of money. They are too worried about social status to call the police, so it’ll be a shoo-in.
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As I recap all of that, I can see where the parallels to Parasite crop up in The Escaping Man. Both of its leads have been repeatedly kicked down by society and are fighting against a system that doesn’t want to give them an ounce of support. Shengli will always have the albatross of rape hanging over his neck while Sia is a divorced mother who still lives at home and can’t afford a better life for her daughter. It doesn’t help that Suen treats Sia like garbage and is tremendously upset that her son might be “deficient.”
The big difference between The Escaping Man and Parasite is that there was a better examination of the ways society will reject those it deems unacceptable in Bong Joon-Ho’s movie. Despite how Shengli is a convicted rapist, he immediately gets another job with the foreman even saying, “As long as he’s not some fugitive, get him hired.” Losing 20+ years of your life is bad, but I guess modern China is fairly progressive when it comes to re-entering the workforce.
The same goes for Sia. We only see her home life when Shengli visits to get information about Sia’s whereabouts. For the remainder of the film, Sia is only ever seen with Fluffy or talking with his mother. Suen is a real bitch and even tries to pin a false robbery on Sia (which is possibly meant as an allegory for what happened with Shengli), but that’s about the extent of what The Escaping Man wants to show us. Maybe there is some usage of the “unreliable narrator” here, but it’s not exactly clear.
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What did become clear to me after a couple of days’ worth of reflection is that Shengli is the one who has a mental disability. When framed through that lens, The Escaping Man takes on a very different shape. While Suen believes her son is some invalid who will wind up worthless, he’s actually just a very honest child. Suen wants her son to grow up faster than he is willing to and instead of fighting back, Fluffy goes with the flow. The NYAFF website calls his attitude “altruism” and while there is a sense of that, I mostly took that he was a child. Children do “dumb” things because they don’t know any better, not because they are stupid.
Shengli, on the other hand, has a fascination with staring at certain objects and can’t understand when people are treating him like garbage. I don’t know if the rape actually happened or not, but my understanding is that it possibly did. When Sia and Shengli do team up and pick out a base of operations, Shengli attempts to sleep with her by grabbing her arms. She is able to fight him off, but it gives you an impression of what really happened all those years ago. Shengli possibly did rape Sia and assumed he had consent because he can’t tell otherwise.
That makes the journey that Shengli and Fluffy have together feel very innocent. Instead of berating the child when he asks to change bowls for dinner, Shengli can see the kid’s imagination. Fluffy has a fear of snakes (even though the bowl has a dragon design) and that design comes to life before the audience’s eyes. Shengli can experience that and he simply trades bowls instead of forcing Fluffy to get over it.
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The Escaping Man might want to be viewed as some mirror of Parasite and the societal woes that drive people to crime, but it’s more like a reverse version of Rain Man. Some of that is hammered home when the blackmailing plan finally gets kicked off and it causes a series of screw-ups to where Fluffy finds Shengli and ruins the entire operation. Suen is waiting there after having paid a ton of cash and her son is off with the surrogate father that actually cares about him.
To me, this movie is more comparable to Shoplifters than Parasite. That film was about found family and the ways that chosen bonds can be stronger than biological ones. Here, Fluffy has a deeper connection with Sia and Shengli because they actually listen to him. His biological parents only want to impress their friends by proclaiming their son got into some prestigious school or is able to perform long division in his head at the age of six. They use him as an accessory.
Now, that isn’t the entire truth and The Escaping Man does highlight that Fluffy’s parents are willing to put themselves in danger to save their son, but it’s certainly a major theme. The other would be that despite Sia’s outer appearance, she really is a conniving person. There are some events later in the movie that make you realize she’s only in this for herself, but I won’t spoil the rest of the plot. The gist is that Shengli is the innocent one while Fluffy is actually quite intelligent for his age. The two just never had the right support to bring out their best qualities.
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Surprisingly, I’ve made it this far without bringing up performances or editing and that’s because I found most of The Escaping Man to be pretty average. This is a very subdued movie, so no one is going over the top or really delivering any kind of powerful monologues. Yan Ni is maybe the standout performance here as she delivers an anger that fits a mother scorned. When she figures out the truth behind the whole scenario, I honestly thought she would start throwing fists at Sia, but the actual turn of events is at least an interesting wrinkle.
Everyone else just feels natural. Maybe that is feint praise, but I was never blown away or even mildly impressed here. The Escaping Man just sort of works as intended without truly highlighting anyone in particular. Even the editing and direct by Wang Yichun feels rudimentary, if acceptable. Some early highlights with music disappear as the film goes on and it’s not until the very end that any kind of stronger emotional soundscape comes back.
I think that’s where I start to feel mixed about this movie. Even the act of writing a review can be a process that helps one come to grips with what they’ve seen, but The Escaping Man feels a bit too concerned with emulating other popular films rather than telling its own unique story. I dig some of the parallels between Shengli and Fluffy and I suppose there is at least a bit of examination done on class divide, but you will have definitely seen this type of film done better before.
Far be it from me to claim that I could ever make a movie even half as good as this, but The Escaping Man just didn’t hit the right notes for me. I guess you can’t win them all.
