Being Towards Death review – Chinese hospital comedy drama uses plucky patients to ask big questions

A debt-laden caregiver attempting suicide is the catalyst for him finding new meaning to life from a ward of terminally ill patients in touching ensemble drama

‘Y ou know the law of entropy? Life is a process of constant decay,” ssays a doctor in this Chinese hospital comedy drama – but not that you’d know it from the gabbling, frenetic first half-hour of director Chen Sicheng’s death-fixated film. Being Towards Death kicks off with caregiver Xiaobing (Jiang Long) about to throw himself off the roof because, after a scheme to flog his superiors care robots fails, he’s in hock to triad loan sharks. Thankfully the film later settles into an intermittently touching ensemble drama with a meta tint; albeit one that doesn’t fully grasp the profundities it’s aiming for.

Hauled back from the ledge, Xiaobing is talked by the hospital director into leading a project studying mental health interventions in terminal cancer care. So he finds himself among the “Ward 10 Fearless Squad”, a group of patients whose outlook is as plucky as their diagnoses are grim. Before long, he has co-opted film director Dao (Wang Zichuan) to make a documentary about his roomies, including bullish property mogul Mau (Cai Ming), browbeaten first son Bowen (Huang Yi) and fib-spinning poppet, Xiaobing (Ye Quanxi) – nicknamed Little Bing.

Being Towards Death feels like Chen’s attempt to make weightier material than the blockbuster Detective Chinatown quadrilogy he’s known for. At one point, Xiaobing appears to serve as his mouthpiece when he chides a group of film executives who have knocked back Dao’s latest script. “Domestic films and TV are so bad lately. Is it because creators no longer talk about creation?” While the film’s broad and demonstrative comedy, hymning that we’re all in this thing called life together, isn’t groundbreaking, it at least has serious questions on its mind. Carouselling around the various wardmates, it invests just enough in each character to make the presiding sentimentality mostly fly.

Where the convalescents here cite booze, food and nature as things that make life worthwhile, cinema is clearly Chen’s answer to that question – judging by the self-referential elements threaded throughout. There’s more than a touch of self-satire in his proxy, Dao, who’s constantly on the hunt for sharp material and spouting directorial quotations (he even cheekily references Chen himself). Oblivious to the advice to avoid sentimentality at all costs from sixth-generation master Jia Zhangke – whom the group meet on an outing to Hengdian World Studios – Chen seems to aspire, like Dao, to a “bittersweet” perspective on existence. But he’s not quite on Jia’s level, or he would realise that the necessary leavening bitterness is largely absent here.