Keep Cool (1997): Zhang Yimou's Forgotten Black Comedy About Modern China
Before Olympic ceremonies and wuxia epics, Zhang Yimou made this chaotic, handheld comedy about urban China. A bookseller, a laptop, and a broken window become a meditation on justice, absurdity, and keeping your cool when everything falls apart.
When people think of Zhang Yimou, they picture sweeping historical epics—Raise the Red Lantern, Hero, House of Flying Daggers. Gorgeous cinematography. Careful compositions. The weight of Chinese history rendered in saturated colors.
Keep Cool is none of those things.
Shot in handheld video style, set in contemporary Beijing, featuring a plot about a broken laptop and a love triangle gone wrong, this 1997 black comedy is the Zhang Yimou film almost nobody talks about. It’s messy, chaotic, intentionally ugly—and it captures something about modern China that his beautiful films never could.
The Setup: A Man, A Woman, A Laptop
Zhao Xiaoshuai (Jiang Wen) is a bookseller in Beijing. He’s in love with An Hong (Qu Ying), a young woman who’s left him for a businessman named Liu Delong. Zhao can’t let go. He follows An Hong. He makes scenes. He refuses to keep cool.
During one confrontation, a passing stranger’s laptop is accidentally broken. This stranger—a calligrapher named Zhang Qiusheng (Li Baotian)—wants compensation. What follows is a spiraling absurdist comedy as Zhao tries to deal with the laptop situation while simultaneously pursuing An Hong and evading Liu Delong’s threats.
It sounds like a sitcom premise. Zhang Yimou turns it into something stranger.
The Handheld Aesthetic
Keep Cool was shot largely with handheld cameras in real Beijing locations, giving it a documentary roughness completely unlike Zhang’s other work. The camera shakes. Focus drifts. Compositions are deliberately awkward.
This wasn’t technical limitation—it was choice. Zhang wanted to capture the chaos of contemporary urban China: the crowded streets, the constant construction, the feeling that everyone is hustling for something. His previous films had presented China as frozen in beautiful tableaux. Keep Cool shows China in motion, messy and alive.
| Previous Zhang Films | Keep Cool |
|---|---|
| Historical settings | Contemporary Beijing |
| Static compositions | Handheld chaos |
| Rural/traditional | Urban/modern |
| Beauty as meaning | Ugliness as truth |
| Careful color design | Documentary naturalism |
Jiang Wen: The Uncontrollable Force
Jiang Wen—who would become a major director himself—plays Zhao with manic intensity. He can’t stop talking. He can’t stop moving. He can’t accept that An Hong has left him, that the world doesn’t operate according to his desires.
There’s something both sympathetic and terrifying about Zhao. His persistence looks like romantic dedication until it tips into stalking. His anger at Liu Delong seems justified until it threatens to destroy everyone. Jiang plays the comedy without losing the danger underneath.
The performance is exhausting to watch—deliberately so. Zhao exhausts everyone around him, and Jiang makes us feel that exhaustion too.
The Laptop as MacGuffin
The broken laptop becomes the film’s absurdist engine. It’s a symbol of the new China—technology, commerce, the things that matter in the post-Mao economy. And it’s just a piece of junk that keeps complicating everyone’s lives.
Zhang Qiusheng, the calligrapher whose laptop was broken, represents traditional China: patient, cultured, philosophical. He wants his compensation, but he’s also interested in Zhao’s situation, offering advice drawn from classical wisdom. The collision between his patience and Zhao’s chaos generates much of the film’s comedy.
“Keep cool,” Zhang Qiusheng advises repeatedly. Nobody does.
The Beijing Setting
Keep Cool captures mid-90s Beijing in transition: construction everywhere, the old hutong neighborhoods being demolished, everyone trying to make money in the new capitalist-but-still-socialist system.
The film is full of telling details: cell phones as status symbols, business cards exchanged constantly, the way connections and face matter more than law. When Zhao accidentally injures someone, the victim’s family immediately starts calculating compensation—injury as business opportunity.
This is China at the moment of transformation, and Zhang (usually so focused on the past) shows he understood the present too.
Black Comedy, Chinese Style
The humor in Keep Cool isn’t Western irony or Hong Kong slapstick. It’s something more specific: the comedy of Chinese bureaucracy, face-saving, and the gap between official rules and actual practice.
When Zhao tries to get help from the authorities, he encounters endless referrals—this department, that office, always somewhere else. When Liu Delong threatens him, the threat is coded in politeness. When violence finally erupts, everyone immediately starts negotiating compensation.
This is comedy born from lived experience—Zhang and his collaborators know exactly how these systems work, and they find the absurdity without losing the reality.
The Ending: Nobody Wins
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: Discussion of the ending follows.
Keep Cool doesn’t resolve cleanly. Zhao doesn’t get An Hong back. The laptop situation spirals into larger conflicts. Violence happens. Nobody really wins.
The final scenes show characters continuing their lives—damaged, changed, but continuing. The city keeps building. People keep hustling. The question of who owes whom what remains unresolved.
This lack of resolution frustrated some viewers. But it’s honest: in the China Zhang depicts, problems don’t solve themselves. They just become part of the ongoing chaos.
Why It’s Forgotten
Keep Cool was a domestic success in China but never found the international audience of Zhang’s other films. The reasons are understandable:
- No gorgeous cinematography to export
- Contemporary setting less “exotic” to Western viewers
- Comedy depends on cultural specificity
- Came after Raise the Red Lantern, before Hero—neither art-house darling nor blockbuster
But for viewers interested in Zhang’s range, or in 1990s Chinese society, Keep Cool rewards discovery. It’s Zhang proving he could do something completely different—and doing it well.
My Rating: 7.5/10
What works:
- Jiang Wen’s committed, exhausting performance
- Captures Beijing in transition
- Genuinely funny cultural observations
- Zhang proving his range
- The laptop as perfect absurdist device
What doesn’t:
- The handheld style can be wearying
- Cultural specificity limits accessibility
- The ending frustrates narrative expectations
- Some scenes run too long
If You Liked This, Try:
- In the Heat of the Sun (1994) — Jiang Wen’s directorial debut
- Beijing Bicycle (2001) — Another urban China observation
- Unknown Pleasures (2002) — Jia Zhangke’s youth in transition
- Crazy Stone (2006) — Later Chinese black comedy
- A Touch of Sin (2013) — Jia Zhangke’s darker take on contemporary China
Keep Cool is the Zhang Yimou film for people who think they know Zhang Yimou. It’s messy where his other films are precise. It’s contemporary where they’re historical. It’s ugly where they’re beautiful.
But it’s also alive in a way that careful art sometimes isn’t. The chaos of modern China—the hustling, the face-saving, the endless negotiation—is rendered without judgment, without beautification, without the comfortable distance of history.
Keep cool, Zhang Qiusheng advises. Nobody does. That’s the joke. That’s the tragedy. That’s China.
References
- Zhang, Yimou. Director interviews, Beijing Film Academy
- Jiang, Wen. Acting retrospective, Chinese Film Magazine
- Berry, Michael. Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers
- Chinese Film Bureau production records, 1997
- Zhang, Yingjin. Chinese National Cinema, Routledge, 2004
