China's candidate for a foreign-language film Oscar is not making much music at the box office, Liu Zhihua reports.

China's official entry to the 2015 Oscars for best foreign-language film, The Nightingale, is not performing too well at the box office. In the first three days of screening after its Oct 31 release, the movie earned only 1.2 million yuan ($195,900). Some 10 days into its run, box-office takings were about 4.96 million yuan, according to Cbooo.cn, a website on Chinese box-office statistics that is widely quoted by Chinese media. Movies that were picked as Oscar entries in the past were also huge box-office hits.

Film producers submit their entry applications to China's State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, and the authorities then pick one to submit to the Academy Awards.

Chinese filmmakers have submitted an entry almost every year for the best foreign-language film category since the early 1980s. Only four of the entries got nominated, including Zhang Yimou's Ju Dou in 1991 and Hero in 2003.

In 1991, Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won the category as a Taiwan entry, which was a significant high point for the Chinese movie industry that year.

Thanks to extensive media reports on the award since then, Chinese movie fans have become increasingly aware of the Oscars, making China's entry a hot topic every year.

In recent years, even if a film has depth and gravitas, almost all of the Chinese entries were box-office hits before they got picked to compete for the Oscars. Those include Feng Xiaogang's Back to 1942, a 2012 movie that brought to light a famine in China's recent history that killed 3 million in one province, and starring Chen Daoming and Zhang Guoli, and lighthearted romances such as The Knot, directed by Yin Li in 2006.

The Nightingale, a small French-Chinese coproduction, took the public by surprise when it was picked earlier last month. Unlike the previous candidates, it had not even been released for general screening.

Directed by French director Philippe Muyl, whose work Le Papillon (The Butterfly) in 2002 won global success, the movie tells a story that resembles the French film - a nostalgic and rough journey in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region by an elderly man and his granddaughter, during which he finds peace with himself and mends his estranged relationship with his son.

In a previous interview with China Daily, Muyl said he spent two years interviewing different Chinese families to prepare for the movie, adding that he believed family-themed comedies always travel well across borders.

The film was finished in 2012, and was released in France in May this year.

By late October, it had earned more than $1.15 million, which isn't a bad number for a foreign language art-house production, and it was well-received by critics, according to Paul Delbecq, the film's French producer.

But the movie's release date in China was postponed several times for unknown reasons, until it had an exclusive screening for a week in late September in Nanning, the capital city of Guangxi, before it opened for general release on Oct 31. The September showing was apparently designed to meet the Oscar criteria that an entry must have been shown in the home country for seven consecutive days before Oct 1, the deadline for submission.

While some critics have praised the movie's universal values of love and family, and its reflection on the hidden problems in modern Chinese families - busy working parents and lonely youngsters and seniors - industry insiders say the movie was unlikely to achieve the same kind of success in the mainland market.

"Studies have found that a majority of Chinese prefer to watch movies with hilarious elements," says Niu Song, the Beijing Ethnic Film Festival's founder.

"Art-house films, such as The Nightingale, will find it hard to draw audiences."

Industry observers also comment that although the distributors played it safe to release the movie shortly after the announcement it will be presented as a candidate for Oscar nomination, hoping to cash in on the fact, it has to compete for audiences against big commercial movies such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Lucy. This may be the reason why it is failing to make money, according to a report by Beijing Business Today.

Some movie fans also question the artistic quality of the movie.

On Douban, one of China's most-popular movie websites, The Nightingale scores a rating of 6.2 out of 10. Many netizens express disappointment with what they thought was a poor storyline and unsatisfactory emotional development, when they compared the movie with Le Papillon.

Contact the writer at liuzhihua@chinadaily.com.cn

Xu Fan contributed to this story.

A poster of the French-Chinese coproduction The Nightingale at a cinema in Yichang, Hubei province, after its release in October. Provided to China Daily

(China Daily USA 11/13/2014 page10)