Micro Love

Micro Love, originally titled Literary Romance in the WeChat Era, is an urban novel by screenwriter and director Gu Wei (pen name Gu Xiaosha). First serialized online, it attracted high click counts and was noticed by director Gu Changwei, who adapted it into the 2014 film of the same name, Micro Love: Entering the Better State. The story revolves around the "three literary musketeers" struggling in Beijing: Shaguo, who dreams of being a screenwriter; Huang Xiaogua, who longs to be an actor; and Ma Dai, who switched from finance to a film and television startup. The three crowd under one roof, barely supporting themselves with odd jobs while scrambling everywhere for money to shoot their script. To win investment from the investor Aunt Ma, Shaguo keeps overturning and rewriting the script to suit her tastes, his ideals worn away with each compromise; meanwhile, Chen Xi, a car model he met through "shake" and other social apps, bursts into his life, and this relationship, strung together across a phone screen, is constantly pulled at by real-world pressure. The work blends the social habits of the "micro era," young people's startup anxiety, and the confusion and persistence of literary youth, using exaggerated comedy and self-mockery to exhaust the awkwardness and unwillingness of life as a Beijing drifter. The so-called "micro love" is both a tiny, cheap encounter and that bit of sincerity still willing to draw close to another in an enormous city.