Not since Zhang Yimou’s 2002 wuxia spectacle “Hero” has China landed an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature — and this dry spell surely won’t be broken with this year’s bombastic submission “Once Upon a Time in the Middle East.” Like most of the country’s entries over the past decade, this blockbuster epic — a summer box office hit at home — makes for an extravagant display of the strength of the nation’s commercial film industry. Strength, in the sense that no modest operation could conceivably pull off the technical wizardry and large-scale worldbuilding showcased here, where an entire city is at one point turned into an inferno of crumbling buildings, and a massive military base is, in a later scene, ambushed in a rain of blazing pyrotechnics.
The film is also, as expected from this state-backed production, blatantly propagandistic — but in a way that is particularly baffling, and shockingly tasteless. If those sound like the elements for a good time, in the B-movie sense, then you are also correct. Against the odds, “Once Upon a Time in the Middle East” is also, both regrettably and miraculously, extremely watchable. The Jekyll part of your brain will tell you to leave but the Hyde-side will keep you seated in morbid, twitchy-eyed fascination over the film’s two-and-a-half hour runtime.
To cut straight to the point, this is a film in which China symbolically emerges from the rubble of the Iraq War as a pacifistic patriarch and guardian of all the world’s children. Director Wen Muyue delivers this subtext through the story of Xu Fu (Shen Teng), a debt-ridden chef who agrees to temporarily take over a Chinese restaurant in the fictional Gulf-region city of Bahata, intending to return to his daughter and mother in China in two years time.
Flash-forwards to an elder Xu Fu with liver spots and a conspicuous scar on his cheek tell us that he will indeed make it back to his family, but it’ll take much longer than a few years — the frankly absurd reasons for his delay a consequence of his, let’s say, geopolitical misfortunes. He’s a man in the wrong place at the wrong time, though, cleverly, the film makes the point that a good Chinese meal is never unwelcome. In fact it’s globally in demand — a lifeline that ensures Xu Fu’s survival through the film’s whirlwind of events.
Before we get to the grisly images of dead children covered in ash, the film starts out as a feel-good dramedy in which Xu Fu adapts to his new surroundings. Frazzled softie Ma Junsheng (Jiang Qiming), the restaurant manager, is our hero’s bridge between China and his new home, translating for Xu Fu between Arabic and Chinese during tense but diplomatic discussions with the restaurant owner Zaid (Sherif Sabby). Glossy, mouthwatering closeups of grilled meats and bubbling stone-pot stews testify to the success of Xu Fu’s kitchen takeover. Nurturing local talent is also on the agenda when he takes on a mentee, Seif (Omar Sharif — no, not that one), an angsty orphan who learns to sublimate his rage into the art of Chinese cooking. Though as the film goes on, this anger grows into a furious, war-hardened desire for retribution. Does a delicious roasted duck stand a chance? It does, in this film’s mind, with the help of the preternaturally compassionate Xu Fu.
“Once Upon a Time in the Middle East” is something of a both-sides film in that both the Americans and the not-so-thinly-veiled Iraqis are gross caricatures of themselves, and there’s particular ire reserved for that most treacherous of abominations: Chinese-American … food. In epic-handshake-meme solidarity, Xu Fu and Zaid agree that their restaurant will never serve U.S.-style Chinese dishes like General Tso’s chicken; and when the US troops bomb Bahata to smithereens and occupy the city, a crass Chinese-American private (Aarif Lee Zhi-ting) bullies his way into free meals at Xu Fu’s restaurant. Not a pushover but a practical-minded realist, the chef takes the punches, striking up a booze-smuggling deal with the Americans to keep the orphans living in his restaurant safe.
The maddening implausibility that sustains the film’s relentless, weirdly hypnotizing forward momentum means we’re never in one place — or one mood — for too long. Zaid’s home is bombed in one intensely melodramatic sequence that culminates in a slow zoom over Zaid cradling his dead wife and child. Next thing we know, he’s radicalized and joins a terrorist group. Xu Fu, Ma Junsheng and Seif — the cooking trio — are promptly captured by the U.S. Army and forced to preside over the kitchen on base. This allows for more sumptuous shots of delicious food while Xu Fu is, for whatever reason, targeted by an aggro, block-jawed American soldier. Xu Fu and Ma Junsheng also play surrogate dads to Seif, whose increasingly violent eruptions threaten to change the course of his life more than once.
For all its dewy-eyed sentimentality, the film is also startlingly brutal and bloody, making for a deranged whiplash effect that’s felt most powerfully in the film’s final act, which is set in a terrorist stronghold where pipsqueaks are brainwashed into becoming suicide bombers. Cozy, brotherly scenes (as when Ma Junsheng slips Seif a smuggled can of soda) are directly followed by executions and montages of plush-bear-wielding kiddies invoking jihad. There’s a slickness to the carnage that rubs uncomfortably against the film’s humanist ethos, rendering artificial (for all Shen Teng’s trembling and mouth-contorting labors) the horrific tragedies that befall its characters. It’s a vision of wartime brutality that’s both blithely matter-of-fact and desperate to pull at our heartstrings; utterly delusional, in other words, and hard to look away from.