Have a Nice Day (2017)

It’s hardly the first place you’d expect a Goethe reference, but the fizzy, ’80s-influenced synthpop song that closes Liu Jian’s animated Berlin competition title “Have a Nice Day” (written, like all the film’s irresistible soundtrack cues, by composer David Liang of the Shanghai Restoration Project) does feature the chorus line, “I am the sorrows of young Werther.” But then, incongruity is sort of the name of the game here: Liu’s storyline may be a slight and generic madcap gangster/hitman/thief movie, but the details of aesthetic design and character interaction flesh it out into something a little more wittily resonant, if not exactly deep. The pointed inventiveness of the carefully premeditated form doesn’t just compensate for the banality of the content, it becomes the content.

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