ABSTRACT
Han Han is a blogger, writer, public icon, movie director – as well as a rally pilot. His recent movie Duckweed is an unofficial adaptation of Back to the Future: the protagonist travels back in time to meet his young parents – and has to let them fall in love in order to be born. This popular movie gives us the opportunity to analyze contemporary’s China plagiarism disorder as well as its desperate need to create and recreate its recent past – hence its positioning between global cultural fluxes and search for local specificities. Via the narrative trick of time travel, Duckweed explores and confronts two chronologically close periods that seem nevertheless unbridgeable: the confrontation that the movie stages in a farcical tone can be read as an allegory of the profound questioning of contemporary Chinese society on its very ethical, historical, and political basis. The movie pattern is to be inscribed in the retro/vintage frenzy, a multilayer symptom of the call for a-synchronicity (slow down the frenetic rhythm of contemporary hyper-connected world), the need to re-evaluate society’s foundations, the quest for origins, and the drive to rewrite and appropriate parent’s (real and cinematic) history.
