“I’m sorry that people are so jealous of me… but I can’t help it that I’m popular.”

Rising young star Bai Baihe takes on the issue of plastic surgery in her upcoming comedy film Facelift Diary (整容日记), which opens in theaters on April 4th.

Facelift Diary is the story of Guo Jing (Bai Baihe), who lost both her job and her boyfriend of three years after she graduated from college. In order to change her fate, she starts undergoing plastic surgery, giving herself double eyelids, an altered chin, polished cheekbones, and a bigger bust. Her fortunes take a change for the better thanks to her new appearance, and she lands a new job and a new boyfriend. But when her new coworkers and boyfriend find out about her facelifts, everything returns to how it used to be.

Check out the trailer below, thanks to iMovieChina, where you can see how a false nose and false breasts can go horribly wrong…

In the most newly released poster, Bai Baihe’s face is surrounded by gloved hands, which appear to be prodding her face into place, so as to match the typical Chinese beauty standard. According to Baike, these standards stipulate that the length of one’s chin should be 1/5 the length of one’s face, and that the width of one’s mouth should be 1/2 the width of one’s face (among many other standards, which are too tiresome to replicate here). Some celebrities who allegedly fit this standard are Crystal Liu Yifei, Vicki Zhao Wei, and Zhang Ziyi.

Bai Baihe, whom you might recognize from A Wedding Invitation (分手合约), The Stolen Years (被偷走的那五年), and Feng Xiaogang‘s latest film Personal Tailor (私人订制), had to go through four hours of makeup each day to make sure that her fake, ugly nose fit with the rest of her face. (She used the time to catch up on sleep.) Incidentally, her uglified version was so effective that when Bai Baihe’s husband, singer Chen Yufan, visited the set, he didn’t recognize her at first. He later joked that he would stop visiting the set if she continued to look like that.

Executive producer Peter Chan says that Facelift Diary is China’s first comedy film to talk about the plastic surgery issue, though he admitted that, as a comedy, the movie’s first and foremost goal is to entertain, not to explicitly bring up the moral implications of a facelift. Nevertheless, he thinks Chinese moviegoers are at the stage where such discussion is possible, commenting, “Everyone used to think that plastic surgery was very negative, but many of my young friends now have a different attitude toward plastic surgery. It’s become something that’s more and more common.”

Facelift Diary also stars Ronald Cheng and singer Zhang Yao. It is directed by Aubrey Lam, who is known for penning the screenplays for Teddy Chan‘s Bodyguards and Assassins (十月围城) and Peter Chan’s American Dreams in China (中国合伙人).

Sources: 1, 2, 3