Have a Nice Day review – unsparing portrait of post-communist society

There’s a bleak beauty to the flyblown market stalls, the weeping concrete, the peeling posters and the blinking neon that form the backdrop to Have a Nice Day. This lean animation brings brutal humour and a decidedly offhand approach to hammer-based violence in an unsparing portrait of a post-communist society. In terms of the unforgiving eye cast over a country’s manifold flaws, there’s a kinship here with Andrey Zvyagintsev’s damning Loveless. Set on the outskirts of a minor city in southern China, the film follows a ragtag ensemble of characters who are linked by a stolen bag of cash.

The individuals, like the animation, are two-dimensional. But that’s surely the point. These are nakedly venal and self-serving people who are motivated entirely by money and short-cuts to an easy life. The cash belongs to gangster Uncle Liu, who breaks off from torturing his former friend, an artist (voiced by director Liu Jian himself), in order to join the search. Liu Jian, an artist as well as an animator, slyly nods to the grinning self-portraits of Chinese painter and sculptor Yue Minjun, perhaps suggesting that the film should be viewed as a direct descendant of the “cynical realist” movement in which Yue Minjun is prominent. Cynical it certainly is, but the realism is punctuated with surreal flourishes – a fantasy musical sequence that nods to communist propaganda posters is one memorable example in a film that is as confrontational in its use of space and pace as it is with its violence.