Promotional material for Summer Detective Photo: VCG

In the 11 days since it was released on November 29, Summer Detective, a Chinese film about two farmers in North China trying to track down a hit-and-run driver, has earned nearly 9.24 million yuan ($1.31 million) at the Chinese mainland box office. 

Although this can hardly be seen as a good performance at the box office compared to the star-studded Two Tigers, which has earned more than 211 million yuan since it was released that same day, Summer Detective has been praised by moviegoers for its realistic depiction of rural village life. 

Set on the North China Plain, the film tells the story of two men on the hunt for the runaway driver who seriously injured their friend in a traffic accident.

All of the performers in the film are not professional actors but relatives and friends of the director Xu Lei. The lead character, in fact, is played by Xu's father. 

The film, also named Rebuilding, currently has a 7.8/10 rating on Chinese media review website Douban and a 6.7/10 on IMDb. 

Some viewers said the film can be considered the Hebei Province version of the dark comedy film The Great Buddha+ (2017) from the island of Taiwan. 

But some others have noted that the film is not dark nor pretends to be profound, it just reflects the actual persistence, honesty and decency of Chinese farmers. 

It has been a long time since a Chinese film has looked at rural life from the perspective of those that live there, according to Shi Wenxue, a Beijing-based film critic and teacher at the Beijing Film Academy. 

There have been some local films about rural villages in recent years, but most of them focused on criticizing the backwardness and ignorance found in rural areas or nostalgically reflecting on the simplicity of rural life and how it has been affected by urbanization, Shi said. 

These kinds of movies, like Mr. Tree and Mirrors and Feathers, used fantastical or surrealist imagery to express cultural concerns, thereby causing them to lack a down-to-earth perspective in depicting rural life, Shi noted.

Xu told media that the story of the film is based on the real experience of one of his relatives, who was hit by a car but refused to report the case to the police since they didn't think it would be possible to find the driver. What's worse, they would not have been able to use their medical insurance if they had called the police, according to Xu.  

They did still make an effort to find out the driver themselves but quickly gave up, which Xu thought was absurd yet interesting. 

"It gives me a feeling of mistaken identity when I think about some farmers trying to solve a case… so I decided to film the story," Xu said.  

The film, Xu's maiden work, won the FIRST 2019 Best Cinematic Script award in August. Held annually in Xining, Northwest China's Qinghai Province, FIRST is an international film festival committed to the discovery and promotion of emerging filmmakers and their early works. 

Unfortunately, the film's good reputation has not helped it commercially. 

The film's screenshare dropped to less than 0.1 percent on Tuesday, according to Chinese ticketing platform Maoyan. 

According to Shi, realistic films about urban life struggle at the box office, let alone one about rural China, as audiences still prefer spending their money on movies that provide pure entertainment or visual spectacle. 

"The market is cruel," Shi noted.
Newspaper headline: Rural detectives