Thirty visitors gathered in room five in the Mixc cinema this afternoon. Like most cinemas in Beijing, it is located in a shopping center, and like most cinemas in China, it shows the hit of the summer: “Welcome to the Dragon Restaurant”. The film grossed almost two billion yuan in August, compared to a good 600 million yuan for the Hollywood film “Odyssey” in the same period. How can this be the case with a film that is not only produced by a commercial film company but also by the Chinese Foreign Ministry and is set in Arabia, which is far away for China?
It's about a Chinese chef who travels to "Bahata", the capital of a fictional state, immediately before the start of the American invasion in 2003. He wants to run a restaurant there and use it to pay off his debts in China. Xu Fu leaves his family behind. But in the fictional Baghdad, the chef soon finds new people to look after: his Chinese waiter is in a relationship with an Iraqi woman who runs an orphanage, which he soon helps look after.
Making money and doing good is one message of the film, which features the most famous actors in China, Jiang Qiming and Shen Teng, and was filmed in Qingdao and Shitanjing using elaborate Imax technology. Xu Fu builds interpersonal relationships, provides practical help, and does no harm to anyone.
Then the American air strikes begin. No political background is mentioned, a nameless US president gives an ultimatum to a nameless president of an unnamed country on the TV in the restaurant kitchen and sends bombs into residential areas: Houses and cars suddenly burn around Xu Fu, people flee in panic. For a few seconds the camera lingers on the corpses of dead Arab toddlers, their blue lips covered in flies. It is a perspective of the victims and the friendly, naive bystanders.
When the American occupiers arrive with their tanks and divide the city, the cook's Iraqi business partner organizes delivery orders to the foreigners as well; their restaurant is right next to the Green Zone. And it serves alcohol. Xu Fu's restaurant becomes a bar at night. Soon, US soldiers also set up shop there. Cursing, tattooed up to their necks, screaming for liquor, which is denied them in the barracks. A GI appears, filmed from the side, sitting at a table, constantly twitching his right leg - a bad habit at the table in Chinese culture, perhaps comparable to peeing in public.
How the roles are distributed is clear. But the plots are not clumsy. An Asian-American soldier soon appears and tells the cook that he is from California and that his family is of Malaysian-Chinese origin. And GI Wang has doubts about the whole thing. He gets drunk, cries and tells the cook Xu Fu in broken Chinese that he wants to go home. He doesn't succeed. Tony Wang is killed by a car bomb.
The film traces how the American invasion wreaks havoc and sets in motion a seemingly endless spiral of violence. The old order of the Baath Party is crumbling. Islamists are taking over, suicide bombers are roaming around. “This is a gang of terrorists that you created yourself,” an Arab says to one of the US soldiers at one point. China, on the other hand, does not send soldiers to conflict areas in the Middle East. On the surface, Beijing promotes a policy of non-interference and good economic relations. Translated into the cinema: At the moment it is not an aggressive film like “Wolf Warrior” with its Rambo-like Chinese hero that dominates, but rather a chef in financial difficulties who you can only love.
Xu Fu's Arab business partner also joins the Islamists after his own family - his daughter has cancer - was killed by anti-Baathists in an attack on his home. "Your partner was the perpetrator. Your friend was the victim. Do you really think you had nothing to do with this war?" Xu is asked by an American.
He has to go to prison, first to that of the Americans who torture high-ranking Islamists. There he works in the prison kitchen and has to mix chili-laced water for the torturer (although he secretly takes mild doses). Eventually, jihadists storm the prison, free their leaders and capture Xu Fu himself. The cook has to go to a jihadist camp where children become assassins.
In the end everything turns out well again, and when chef Xu Fu travels to Baghdad again as a tourist after years in a tour group of a Chinese business association, he sees how his old restaurant is prospering and is run by his former orphans. At this point, the pro-Chinese Iraqi influencer Ahmed Mohammed Jaber al Kalthum ("Laowang") makes a cameo appearance as a waiter - Kalthum was allowed to ask an obliging question as a journalist at Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's annual press conference the year before last.
Chinese cinema: “Breaking Hollywood's war narrative with a meal,” said Chinese state television about the film. The state-affiliated blog "Yuyuan Tantian" added: "For decades, the West had the monopoly on the definition of 'terrorism', 'freedom' and 'human rights' and long left the voices of the Global South unheard. Now China is changing this dynamic." Beijing is increasingly convincing its own people of these messages, but is also increasingly spreading its own version of history and stories around the world.
“Welcome to the Dragon Restaurant” is partly based on the actual experiences of three Chinese restaurant operators during the Iraq War, who served not only Iraqis and diplomats in Baghdad, but also US soldiers. The film will also be released in cinemas in Southeast Asian countries and Australia in mid-September. There are large communities of Chinese origin there, and in many places they consider themselves to be part of the “Global South”.
The Foreign Ministry in Beijing invited diplomats from more than 70 countries to a demonstration. The plan is for the film, which was distributed internationally under the title “Once upon a time in the middle east,” to also come to Europe. However, according to the advertising campaign running on all platforms, it is primarily aimed at its own people.
“I found the portrayal of Americans a bit too stereotypical,” said a visitor in the foyer after the performance. Otherwise he liked the film. “It could have been more brutal,” he says, when asked about the violent scenes. He is a film fan and is used to a lot of things here. Friends recommended the work to him, and he also came because of the famous director Wen Muye.
Although he liked the “Odyssey” better, he says, this film by Christopher Nolan, which is playing in the hall next door, is “on a different level” in terms of quality. But he doesn't regret visiting the "Dragon Restaurant" either: "A great story, well told, albeit in a commercial way, designed to make people cry." And it seems that the flow of visitors to China continues unabated.
