Take Off

The first 15 minutes of Take Off cite Hegel not once but twice. It goes without saying how unique this aspirational source is within the context of global cinema. Only in China can a feel-good film with mainstream ambition point to Georg W.F. Hegel, the notoriously dense 19th century German idealist whose dialectics blossomed into dialectical materialism under the tutelage of Karl Marx. “A nation is hopeless without those who look up to the stars,” the quote goes, situating individual aspirations within national ones. The quote also points upward, in a literal sense, to the sky, and here works winkingly with the film’s narrative about a man who reluctantly picks up his self-made flying device one last time in roder to save his nephew. The most amusing aspect of the quote’s inclusion is that there is no evidence Hegel ever wrote or said this; it even sounds too pithy to be from the Hegel encountered by humanities students in graduate school. Yet the very invocation of his name functions as a kind of motivational cue. This tells us something about the state of mainstream film in the mainland: dialectical materialism (or the appearance of it) is king — or chairman?

Jiang Qiming, hot in the press right now from Once Upon a Time in the Middle East, plays Li Mingqi, a factory worker in Northeast China’s rustbelt who learns to fly. A dream passed down from his father, Li scratches his itch with hot air balloons, though it is his own self-made parachute-and-jetpack flying device that he is really passionate about. But an accident leaves his brother-in-law disabled, and the guilt freezes his passion. The film begins in the 1970s and moves through the present, witnessing economic change and reform in the process. A television show that gamifies profit certainly encapsulates these reforms, and when Li’s nephew is in need of emergency surgery that his family can’t afford, the flying man pulls out his suit for one last jump. If he can jump from the radio tower (representing the rustbelt’s industrial past) and land on his feet in a small circle by a faraway river (indicating a new direction for its future), he will win the funds his nephew needs. 

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