General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Keep Cool (有话好好说)

Keep Cool (有话好好说) is a 1997 Chinese urban comedy directed by Zhang Yimou, adapted from the writer Shu Ping's short story Evening Paper News (晚报新闻), about a bookseller's obsessive pursuit of his ex-girlfriend and the escalating conflict that follows in 1990s Beijing.¹^•² It was Zhang's first film set entirely in a contemporary city, a marked departure from the rural and period settings of his earlier work.³

Key fact	Detail
Director / screenwriter	Zhang Yimou; screenplay by Shu Ping, from his short story Evening Paper News¹
Release	16 May 1997 (mainland China); 2 September 1997 (Venice Film Festival)⁴
Principal cast	Jiang Wen (Zhao Xiaoshuai), Li Baotian (Zhang Qiusheng), Qu Ying (An Hong), Ge You (the policeman), with Zhang Yimou as a peddler²
Cinematography	Lu Yue, using hand-held camera, close shots of faces, dense high-contrast lighting, and rapid unconventional editing²
Festival record	Nominated for the Golden Lion in the main competition of the 54th Venice Film Festival; won no award there⁴^•⁵
Box office	About 46 million yuan in China, a striking figure for 1997; producer Zhang Weiping nonetheless lost about 18 million yuan on the production⁶
Awards	Li Baotian, Best Supporting Actor, 21st Hundred Flowers Awards⁴

Spoilers

Plot

Zhao Xiaoshuai (Jiang Wen) is an individual bookseller who cannot accept that his girlfriend An Hong (Qu Ying) has left him, and he pursues her relentlessly, at one point hiring migrant workers to shout "An Hong, I miss you" below her window while dousing them with buckets of water.¹^•⁷ An Hong is now involved with Liu Delong (Liu Xinyi), a wealthy nightclub owner, who has Xiaoshuai beaten.²^•⁸

In the scuffle Xiaoshuai grabs the bag of a passing intellectual, Zhang Qiusheng (Li Baotian), and smashes the laptop computer inside it.⁸ The film then turns on the dispute over who should pay for the computer. Zhang Qiusheng, a mild-mannered researcher who believes that reason and negotiation can settle anything, shuttles between the two men to secure compensation; when he learns that Xiaoshuai intends to attack Liu Delong with a cleaver, his goal shifts to preventing a crime, and he preaches the film's title idea, "talk things over properly" (有话好好说).⁹ In the ending, after being abused by a fat cook, Zhang Qiushen himself loses control and reaches for a knife, abandoning the principle he had been defending.⁹ A policeman played by Ge You sums up the film's advice: "If countries can find a way to sit down and negotiate, why can't you?"²

Production

Zhang Yimou approached Shu Ping in 1995, shortly after completing Shanghai Triad, wanting to make a city film; the screenplay took more than a year to write, the film was shot in 1996, and it was released in 1997.¹^•¹⁰ Zhang later described the process at a Beijing Film Academy screening in April 1997: script preparation took about a year with many revisions, shooting in Beijing was quick at about a month and a half, editing took over two months, and the cast rehearsed together beforehand, with style discussions and trial footage shot on BETACAM video.¹¹

The film was financed by the real-estate businessman Zhang Weiping, who invested 26 million yuan without a rigorous contract defining investment and returns; a year after the collaboration, in 1997, he registered Beijing New Picture Film Company with 10 million yuan, beginning his long producing partnership with Zhang Yimou.¹²^•⁶

Cannes withdrawal and festival reception

The film was selected for the Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival, but its planned international premiere there did not take place. AFI's festival notes state that the entry was pulled from competition by the Chinese government; the International Film Festival Rotterdam's catalog attributes the stop to the Chinese authorities' anger over the screening of another controversial Chinese film, Zhang Yuan's East Palace, West Palace.²^•¹³

The film instead screened at the Venice Film Festival on 2 September 1997, where it was nominated for the Golden Lion but won nothing; the Italian jury member, director Francesco Vezzoli-type dissent aside, Sanlian Lifeweek reported that European critics considered the outcome unfair, and the jury member, the Italian director, said he felt uneasy that Zhang had not won.⁴^•⁵

Box office and commercial significance

The production and distribution sides fared very differently. Zhang Weiping lost about 18 million yuan on the film after production and distribution fell out of step, while the distributor Dong Ping, who bought the distribution rights for 8 million yuan and marketed it on the novelty of "Zhang Yimou entering the city", took in a 1997 box office of about 46 million yuan and earned over 10 million yuan.⁶ The screenwriter Shu Ping later recalled the box office as "over 40 million, and ticket prices were very cheap then", which he considered acceptable by today's standards.¹⁰

Chinese film historians place the film among the urban comedies of the 1990s, alongside The Dream Factory and Be There or Be Square, that used plain, grounded popular language and helped establish a landscape in which mainstream-theme films, art films, and commercial films stood as three coexisting pillars.¹⁴ The People's Daily account of commercial cinema in the 1990s lists it, with The Road Home, as an important representative and successful example of domestic commercial film produced with New Picture.¹⁵

Style and critical standing

Zhang Yimou described his approach in a festival statement: favoring the mobility of a hand-held camera, close shots of the actors' faces, very dense and high-contrast lighting, and a rapid, unconventional editing style, to reflect his impressions of a China in which city people are busier and more hurried than ever, and in which "their greatest need will always be to talk to each other and understand one another".² The Rotterdam catalog compares the result to the style of Wong Kar-wai, shot entirely by hand with dialogue in colorful, coarse Mandarin, and notes that the film pictures a Chinese society changing rapidly while remaining traditional.¹³ Critics have described the film as black comedy: its farcical surface carries a serious theme of urban restlessness and failed communication in a period of rapid economic growth.⁸

Reception at release was mixed. The critic Chen Mo wrote that the film drew wide attention and some controversy, centered on whether its form was purely original and on what it actually had to say; he judged it neither an art film nor a pure commercial film, and noted the contrast between its domestic box-office success and its cold reception in international awards.¹⁶ Zhang Yimou himself has said he considers the film underrated.¹⁷ On Douban it holds a rating of 8.5 from more than 268,000 users, ranking better than 96 percent of drama films and 98 percent of comedies on the site.⁴

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 1995 to 1999 › Black and satirical comedies › Released 1995 to 1998

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

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