Perhaps more than in any other genre, the subjectivity of comedy makes it difficult to fully judge a singular work by any metric of criticism other than personal taste. The experiential bias inherent in humor is doubly exacerbated by issues of nationality – how does one properly judge the effectiveness of comedy rooted in a completely different cultural context? This is why it’s difficult to discuss The Great Chinese Beans, a manic 2004 Egyptian comedy buried deep in the annals of Netflix, where few wander. A quick glance through the movie’s Letterboxd profile, decently rated at a 3.4/5, will reveal a wide array of perspectives: “Best experienced as a fever dream,” “the best comedic Egyptian movie ever made,” “way more racist than I remember,” or even “this is one of the funniest movies to ever grace my eyeballs.” The truth is, depending on your perspective, The Great Chinese Beans may be the funniest, most offensive or most grating movie you’ve ever seen.
Directed by Sherif Arafa, a prolific Egyptian director with a career spanning well over three decades, The Great Chinese Beans (alternately known as The Great Fava Beans of China) follows Mohyee El-Sharkawi (Mohamed Henedi), the cowardly grandson of a ruthless mobster who is reluctant to be enlisted in his family’s misdeeds. When he bungles an important job, Mohyee is sent off to China to take part in an international cooking competition, in the hopes of winning a generous cash prize. Once in China, he meets Li (Kamala Kumpu Na Ayudha), a translator with whom he falls in love, and becomes embroiled in an assassination plot to poison the head of the cooking jury. While barely over 90 minutes in length, Arafa’s film packs a lot into a short runtime – a definite expression of the belief that “more is more.” The camera swings wildly, pushing in and out with the physics of a cartoon. The lighting is just as dramatic, making ample use of dramatic spotlights and shadows, though the effect is lessened by the unfortunately poor quality of the digital print currently available on streaming.
Henedi – at least on a national level – is well-known. In an article for The Wall Street Journal, writer Yasmin Elrashidi refers to him as being “considered the Robert De Niro of the Middle East.” This is a generous assertion. Whether or not Henedi is more comparable to Taxi Driver De Niro or Dirty Grandpa De Niro is unclear, though evidence suggests the latter. However, he does display decent comedic timing and a willingness to dive head-first into the movie’s aggressive physical humor, undeniably making the proceedings more tolerable than they could’ve been otherwise. Similarly, Arafa’s direction is surprisingly engaging. Excessive cinematography aside, the seasoned director makes a variety of inventive choices behind the camera that keep the movie absorbing from moment-to-moment, even as the production value shows some obvious seams (it was shot in Thailand, though it takes place in China).
More than anything, The Great Chinese Beans is incredibly loud. This is a comedy in which everyone yells, since presumably the material will be funnier if spoken at a higher volume. Along with a distinct lack of stakes, this makes the experience increasingly more exhausting than humorous. It’s also, perhaps predictably, rather racist. The Chinese setting is little more than excuse to engage in various tropes of exoticism, culminating in an especially unfortunate use of yellowface when Mohyee disguises himself as a Chinese man in order to evade an excessively stereotypical assassin. Towards the climax, Arafa constructs several martial arts sequences that include wire-work and Bojutsu (a Japanese pole-fighting technique), in a late-stage attempt to transform the movie into an action comedy. Because Mohyee is portrayed as incompetent throughout, his transformation into valorous warrior makes little sense. In general, it’s hard to root for the character beyond his initially good-hearted attempts to resist a career in crime.
Even so, the movie’s heart is in the right place. Though the film threatens an unlikely romance, Mohyee and Li are never more than friends, a realistic outcome considering the dynamic between the characters. If a message can be taken from the story, it’s that succeeding at something is less important than attempting it, and that’s a valuable idea to promote regardless of the movie’s content. About the title – beans barely play a role in the narrative. Indicative of the screenplay’s hyperactive construction, the story only briefly alludes to its eponymous legumes when Mohyee uses them as part of a dish for the cooking finals, somehow winning first place in the entire contest. Flavor can certainly make up for a lack of substance, and perhaps these beans are so delicious that they overcome the competition. But there’s a lot of ingredients in The Great Chinese Beans, and most of them don’t go together very well at all. Nevertheless, that’s just one critic’s opinion. You could do much worse with a plunge into the vaults.
The post From the Vaults of Streaming Hell: The Great Chinese Beans appeared first on Spectrum Culture.