Alternate Universe 03: I Don't Like Bullfrogs

Reviewing YOLO by Jia Ling

Hi there. Welcome to Active Faults. 

If we’re talking film in its visual artwork capacity, YOLO was not the best in this year’s CNY releases. Minus several highlights here and there, the dialogues lacked refinement, the music was unremarkable, and the actors’ delivery (especially Zhang Xiaofei) was not as emotive compared to “Hi, Mom”. 

SCMP’s piece on the film, like many other reviews, focused on her low-salt low-fat diet plans and made YOLO sound like a sensationalist documentary of Jia Ling’s “dramatic 50kg weight loss”. But this is the exact opposite of what Jia Ling intended. In AF’s weekly roundup prior to YOLO’s release, I wrote how Jia has explicitly stated that this is not a film about becoming thinner, and rather a story about “finding yourself and loving yourself”. In that sense, she aced it.

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We see, in the very first scene of the film, Jia’s character waking up in the afternoon. Leying, a doppelganger of Jia herself (“le-ying” becomes “ling” if you pronounce it fast enough) is a woman in her early thirties. We’d later learn that she has been unemployed since graduating from college and moving back home to live with her parents in a fictional third-tier town. At this point, Leying weighs over 105 kg, sleeps through the day and would only drag her footsteps downstairs to ask her mum about dinner. In preparation for the role, Jia first gained 20kg to create a character so overweight she “appears to be clumsy, intensely withdrawn, alienated and stigmatised by society”. 

We then see Leying slowly grit her teeth through the betrayal of a lover with her best friend, as well as clashes with her family before deciding to move out and find a job. She meets and falls for Hao Kun, a boxing instructor next door to where she works as a waitress. It’s clear that Kun wants to trick her into buying a class membership, but she starts to learn from him anyway. At this point I thought, not without feeling disappointed, that her transformation was “driven by love”. And I was oh so wrong.