Life in a Town Without Pity: L.A.

First, the heroine gets robbed at knifepoint in an opulent home in Hancock Park. Next, she and a friend waltz into the middle of a violent holdup at a trendy Pasadena restaurant. After that, the hapless pair inadvertently get caught in a bust of an L.A.-based illegal-immigrant smuggling ring.

“Don’t move,” Liu Yuan warns his frightened companion, Li Qing, as immigration officers swarm in, automatic rifles waving. “American cops will shoot.”

Just your typical Los Angeles experience? It is for Liu and Li, the accident-prone lead characters of the new Chinese hit film, “Be There or Be Square.” Three weeks into its release, the movie--the first Chinese production shot entirely in the United States--is set to become the highest-grossing film ever shown in China, with the exception of “Titanic.”

Audiences are flocking to theaters to see two of China’s most famous actors, Ge You and Xu Fan, play a pair of star-crossed immigrants struggling to carve out new lives in the City of Angels. Lured across the Pacific to a land as fraught with peril as promise, the duo run into a series of mishaps, bicker incessantly and ultimately fall in love, in a movie that could be described as “When Harry Met Sally” with Chinese characteristics.

Those attributes include a budget that is considered lavish by Chinese standards but would barely pay for the catering on a Hollywood set. Already, the movie has nearly earned back its $1.3-million cost from its Beijing box-office receipts. An estimated 200,000 Beijingers saw the film over the New Year’s holiday weekend, according to official media reports. Nationwide, the producers are hoping to rake in about $5 million, an impressive amount in a land where pirated copies of the film already are available on the streets for about $2 apiece, less than the price of a movie ticket.

Set entirely in the L.A. area, “Be There or Be Square” abounds with locations instantly recognizable to any Angeleno: a stretch of La Brea Avenue, “the white zone” outside an LAX terminal, stately Pasadena City Hall. But director Feng Xiaogang deliberately avoided easy icons such as the Hollywood sign or the beach to keep the film from becoming a location-dominated picture; the city is almost beside the point.

“The fact that it’s Los Angeles is not that important to the movie,” Feng acknowledged in an interview, his voice raspy from the cigarettes he smokes nonstop. “I didn’t want to give the impression that the two leads are tourists. I wanted people to understand that they’re immigrants living in L.A.”

Still, that hasn’t kept moviegoers in China from forming their own opinions of Los Angeles based on the events in the 100-minute film, which often revolve around crime.

Armed robbers pop up with alarming frequency, even in broad daylight: Liu and Li walk into a nasty robbery at lunchtime in Patakan, a restaurant in Old Town Pasadena. Law enforcement personnel constitute most of the bit parts, from the immigration commandos to the police officers who take Chinese lessons from Liu, learning how to say “Hit the ground” and “Serve the People” (the title of an essay by Mao Tse-tung) in Chinese. Sirens occasionally keen in the background.

“There seem to be problems with . . . public order,” said Zhao Hongfei, 24, settling on a diplomatic turn of phrase after watching the movie one blustery evening at a cinema here near Tiananmen Square.

Xu Yufang, 26, agreed. “Public security isn’t so good,” she observed, but nodded as her companion, Liu Yongli, added sympathetically: “There’s some violence, but any country would have that.”

Feng said his aim was not to depict Los Angeles as the font of all violence. Instead, the plot of his romantic comedy, which he co-wrote, calls for bad luck continually to befall the two protagonists as a way of bringing them together yet pulling them apart at the same time. “It’s a joke,” he said. “The movie is about two people who are always running into disaster.”

Nor does the film gloss over the elusiveness of the American dream. Liu--played by Ge, who won an award at Cannes in 1994 for his role in the epic film “To Live”--resides in a trailer and is a jack-of-all-trades: a stagehand on a movie set, a sales agent for “Rose Hills Cemetery,” a tour-group operator. Li, played by Xu, tries to earn her keep as a housekeeper, florist and custodian at a BMW dealership.

Beneath the film’s veneer of Southern California sunshine, one viewer here even detected a glimpse of the Balkanization of Los Angeles lamented by urban prophets such as Mike Davis. “The Americans and the Chinese were in separate circles,” said Zhu Ming, a 30-year-old employee at an advertising agency. “And the two circles didn’t mix.”

The characters themselves broadcast that impression. When Li recalls living in Monterey Park--or Little Taipei in the movie--she muses: “Even the mailmen were Chinese. I used to lie in bed and wonder, did I move to Guangdong [province]?”

“Be There or Be Square” first hit theaters on Christmas Eve, part of a group of films that China is marketing as “New Year’s movies” in a bid to plump up its domestic film industry, which is increasingly being eclipsed by the few foreign films, most American, allowed to be shown in China each year.

Unusually, the movie already carries English subtitles, a move to make it more palatable for distributors worldwide. But its producers may want to take a closer look at the English translation before shopping it around.

Throughout, when the characters speak Chinese, the English subtitles are concise, idiomatic and easy to understand, written by an American who has spent several years living in China.

When minor characters speak in English, the film continues to provide English subtitles. But those additional subtitles, which should have been a straight transcription from the script, were mangled by Chinese translators into lines that had some native English speakers laughing at a recent screening.

During a funeral scene, for example, a priest invoked “the peace that passeth understanding” and asked that “the Lord lift up his countenance” on the dearly departed. The subtitles summoned “the peace, the passions, human understanding,” and then requested that God “lift up thy continent.”

Later, in a restaurant, a comely waitress’ innocuous query, “Are you ready to order?” came out as: “Are you randy to order?”

Be there or be square, indeed.