Sam Voutas’ Red Light Revolution is about challenges involved in opening a sex toy shop in Beijing, a city of 22 million in China, a country of 1.3 billion where sex is clearly a popular activity. It’s a wildly entertaining, very funny lesson in a) face; b) getting generations to get along; and c) bureaucracy. Unlike that stream of Hollywood comedies about haplessly horny men and the women who drive them wild, it’s not prurient.
Shunzi, the pudgy, moon-faced hero, loses his job as cab driver when he talks back to his boss and winds up hawking tea in a supermarket. His partner is the hypercute Lili, whose tight clothes become her far more than Shunzi’s do him. When Shunzi’s wife cuckolds him and throws him out of the house, he goes to stay with his elderly parents, so sexually insatiable their sounds keep him up at night. Shunzi hooks up with old buddy Jiang, a smooth sex toy entrepreneur who introduces Shunzi to Mr. Iggy, his backer – and a supremely bad painter with a rock ‘n’ roll flair.
The plot is complicated, the characterizations on, the acting wonderfully over the top. Jun Zhao is kinetic and droll as Shunzi; Vivid Wang plays an endearingly bossy Lili; and Masanobu Otsuka kills as Mr. Iggy, a delightfully garish contrast to Bing Bo as Old Qu, the puritanical neighborhood watch tribune who forces Shunzi and Lili to turn over their inventory nightly (the shoe polish scene is a keeper).
Wang told me Australian director Voutas had no problem filming in China, where the movie has had private screenings in Beijing and her hometown of Shanghai. It’s not about politics, a taboo subject in China, but about “opening a sex shop,” she said, adding she thinks “it’s just a matter of time” before Red Light Revolution gains widespread distribution in China. It will be shown at various festivals in the U.S. The idea is to create such buzz for it in the West, China will demand it at home. It’s definitely a hit in waiting.
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Reviews are scored on a four-star scale.
Red Light Revolution plays again on Wednesday, March 30 at 2:00 PM at the Cleveland International Film Festival.
