General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Duckweed

Duckweed (乘风破浪; also romanized as Cheng feng po lang) is a 2017 Chinese comedy-drama-fantasy film directed and written by Han Han, in which a champion rally driver, after a near-fatal crash in 2022, is transported back to 1998 and befriends the young gang leader who is his own father.¹^•² It was Han Han's second feature, following his debut The Continent, and it opened in mainland China on January 28, 2017, the first day of the Lunar New Year holiday.¹^•² The film became one of the standout commercial successes of that year's Lunar New Year release window, passing the 1 billion yuan (about $150 million) mark at the domestic Chinese box office.¹

Key fact	Detail
Original title	乘风破浪 (Cheng feng po lang), Mandarin with English subtitles¹
Director and writer	Han Han, his second feature after The Continent¹
Principal cast	Deng Chao as Xu Tailang, Eddie Peng as Xu Zhengtai, Zhao Liying as Xiao Hua, Dong Zijian as Xiao Ma³
Release	Mainland China January 28, 2017; United States February 10, 2017 (limited, China Lion Film Distribution)²^•⁴
Runtime	101 minutes¹
Box office	$152,894,264 worldwide, of which $471,575 (0.3%) came from the US and Canada⁴
Critical reception	86% Tomatometer from 7 reviews and an 80% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes³
Awards	Nominated for Best Chinese Language Film from the Two Coasts at the 37th Hong Kong Film Awards (2018)⁵

Spoilers

Plot

The story is set in 2022, where the 23-year-old rally driver Xu Tailang (Deng Chao) has just won the national rally championship. He resents his father Xu Zhengtai, blames him for his mother's early death, and races partly to prove himself to him. After his victory he drives his father at speed and collides with an oncoming train.⁶

Waking in 1998, Tailang falls in with a group of friends in the small town of Tinglin and discovers that the young Zhengtai (Eddie Peng) leads the local gang of righteous youth, the "Zhengtai Gang". Tailang comes to know his father as a brother-in-arms, meets his mother Xiao Hua (Zhao Liying) while she is Xu Zhengtai's girlfriend, and realizes that his father will soon be imprisoned for six years after acting on gang loyalty.¹^•⁷^•²⁰ Through these experiences Tailang gains a new understanding of his own origins, and the father-son conflict that frames the film is softened into mutual recognition.⁷

The time-travel premise places the film in a lineage of earlier works. Han Han acknowledged in an interview that the device of a son traveling back to become his father's friend or brother had appeared in films such as Terminator 2 and the Hong Kong comedy He Ain't Heavy... He's My Father (新难兄难弟), while maintaining that his own arrangement and comic temperament made the film distinct.⁸ Chinese critics likewise compared it to Peter Chan's He Ain't Heavy... He's My Father and Back to the Future.⁹^•⁵

Production and release strategy

A fast production aimed at the holiday window. Han Han conceived the story during the promotion of The Continent two years earlier and wrote a script of about 30,000 characters before starting production.¹⁰ Filming ran from September 2016 to December 14, 2016, with locations including Zhoushan and Dingzha in Zhejiang, Jinshan in Shanghai, and the old street of Wushi.¹¹ The film was deliberately aimed at the Lunar New Year slot, one of the most competitive release windows of the Chinese year, and its scheduling was announced only at the end of December 2016.⁸ Han Han said post-production work on editing, effects, and sound was started during shooting, so that the total production time was about four and a half months, with the crew working around the clock in the editing room after wrap.⁸

The production was backed by nine companies, including Bona Film Group as distributor, Deng Chao's Orange Image, Alibaba's ticketing platform Taopiaopiao, the publisher Guomai Culture, and Wanhe Tianyi, whose contracted actor Zhang Benyu took a supporting role.⁸ Bona's chairman Yu Dong predicted before release that word of mouth would carry the film to a comeback win within the holiday period.⁸

Box office performance

The film opened on January 28, 2017 with 66.93 million yuan on its first day in mainland China, behind Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back, Buddies in India, and Kung Fu Yoga. Its daily takings then rose as word of mouth spread: by February 2 it had accumulated 395 million yuan, and on February 5 its single-day gross of 63.82 million yuan lifted it past Buddies in India into third place for the day.¹¹^•¹² In the comScore worldwide weekend estimates for February 5, 2017, Duckweed ranked third globally with $29.5 million for the weekend and a running total of $90 million.¹³ It crossed 1 billion yuan in cumulative mainland gross on February 22, 2017.¹¹ A Russian-language survey of the film records a final 2017 Chinese ranking of seventh with 1.049 billion yuan.¹⁴

Outside China the film earned modestly. In the United States and Canada, released by China Lion Film Distribution in 27 theaters on February 10, 2017, it opened with $160,739 and finished its six-week run at $471,575, only 0.3 percent of the worldwide total of $152,894,264.⁴

Reception and controversy

Critical response. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 86% Tomatometer from 7 reviews, with an 80% audience score from more than 250 ratings.³ Katie Walsh of the Los Angeles Times described its "whimsical, magical realist sensibility" and noted that it uses fantasy to reveal "poignant truths about empathy and redemption", while faulting its multiple endings.³^•¹⁵ Maggie Lee of Variety called it more relaxed and carefree than the other Lunar New Year blockbusters of its year, "sprinkled with witty grace notes".³ The Film Society of Lincoln Center, programming it at the 2017 New York Asian Film Festival, called it the most playful of the recent wave of Chinese father-son reconciliation films.¹ On the Chinese review site Douban it scored 6.9, the highest of the major 2017 Lunar New Year releases, ahead of Kung Fu Yoga (5.7) and Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back (5.6).¹² Some Chinese critics were less favorable: a Beijing Evening News review judged the plot hollow and the film weaker than The Continent, and a Wenhui Daily critic argued that fragmented gags and language games kept the film's potentially tragic material from accumulating emotional weight.¹⁶^•⁹

The theme song dispute. Before release, two theme songs sung from a husband's point of view, adapted from Japanese musician Masashi Sada's 1980s song "Kanpaku Sengen" (关白宣言), drew accusations that the lyrics promoted a servile role for wives, with phrases interpreted as demanding that a wife sleep later and rise earlier than her husband.¹⁷ The controversy became a widely reported episode in Chinese discussion of gender portrayal in film, with Fudan University family studies scholar Shen Yifei among those commenting on the broader pattern.¹⁷ Han Han responded in a January 22, 2017 online question-and-answer session that the release timing of the songs had been mishandled, that the film's male lead is devoted to his wife, and that the film contains substantial parts of female independence in Zhao Liying's character; "that was our own work not done well", he said of the rollout.¹⁸

Awards

The film was nominated for Best Chinese Language Film from the Two Coasts at the 37th Hong Kong Film Awards in 2018, and received a Best Actor nomination at the Asian New Talent Award in 2017; it also won a Students' Choice Award for Favorite Actress and a Jury Award for Best Editor in 2017.⁵ Chinese listings record it winning the award for the mainland film most popular with Taiwanese audiences at the tenth Cross-Strait Film and Television Season, alongside the Hong Kong Film Award nomination.¹¹

Other uses of the title

A separate feature-length film-essay also titled Duckweed, directed by Matthew Berka and centered on the British writer of supernatural fiction Quentin S. Crisp reading from his own zuihitsu of the same name, was released on October 16, 2026.¹⁹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 2017 to 2018 › Titles A to J

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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