Tag: China

Return to Dust (Yin Ru Chen Yan)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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China might have made massive economic advances in the last few decades, but what of the people caught between the cracks of the country’s huge economic achievements? Li Ruijun looks at a simple farmer couple in northernmost Gansu, creating a poetic tale that unfolds with the simplicity of a fable.

Ma (Wu Renlin) and Guiying (Hai Qing) didn’t have much say in their marriage, arranged by their respective families, but slowly warm to each other anyway. She is severely disabled, unable to hold her bladder, while he is very taciturn, happiest when working the field. Their relationship is sweetly rendered by Ruijun, whether it’s the way they cook for each other, keep one another warm or imprint the shape of a flower on each other’s skins with individual grains. You won’t hear phrases like “I love you” or see them making love or cuddling, yet the love they have for each other is self-evident. But they are hopelessly, bitterly poor, their poverty viewed by others in the community as more of a hindrance than a problem to be solved. This pride and passion eventually clashes against a world that seemingly has no more use for them.

This is a sad yet dignified story, buoyed by slow cinema techniques that rarely cut away. Shooting with a boxy frame, the beauty and toil of working the land gains epic dimensions, the characters often dwarfed by the sky behind them. The pain and reward of their lifestyle is rendered in unwavering detail, the camera utilising long takes in showing the process involved in farming. With so many films using computer generated effects almost without thought, there is something epic about the physicality and realism of the landscapes and the way they are transformed here.

Both Renlin and Qing turn in fine performances — there is a real skill in being able to play people with so little without delving into caricature or moral simplicity. Ruijun doesn’t have any grand speeches or wider sociological screeds, but seems to simply observe, allowing the audience to draw their own conclusions.

The film asks: who are these rapid changes for and why are people being left behind? When offered an apartment Ma points out that there would be no space for his trusted donkey, pigs and chickens. But when you’re proceeding on a so-called Grand Plan — the likes of which the Chinese government loves to implement — considering every individual’s problems simply isn’t an option. With so much Western focus on China on its huge population and staggering technological advances, Ruijun invites us to zoom in and focus on the minutiae of rural life, with people kept in a trap of poverty through no fault of their own. The final result is quietly devastating; there’s no bang, but a long sad whimper.

Return to Dust plays in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, running from 10-20th February.

Who is Sleeping in Silver Grey (Bai tian zong shi tai guo man cahng)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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On a purely aesthetic level, Who is Sleeping in Silver Grey is a masterpiece. On a narrative level it frustrates as much as it beguiles, resulting in an impenetrable experience. One repeated motif is a bird smashing its head against a glass windowpane. I couldn’t help but feel like this bird, seeing the images in front of me but unable to get through to their genuine meaning.

It begins in Shanghai, 1927; pre-revolution, bustling and international. The first thing we notice is the rain, constantly pelting down in almost every early scene. A New Year’s celebration is led by an Italian jazz band; it quickly cuts to a funeral for the Italian pianist. The young Yang Zipei (Ze Ying) carries his baby, facing an uncertain future.

We learn nothing more of her, the film quickly jumping decades into the future, with her granddaughter Cheng Die (Yinyin Ma) teaching piano in Dehai City (which doesn’t seem to exist in reality…). It’s clear from this epic jump in time that Who Is Sleeping in Silver Grey is uninterested in telling a conventional story, often confusing in its depiction of who relates to who, why something is happening or how certain scenes develop. It uses nightmare logic to create a poetic reverie, the topic of which is frustratingly out of my grasp. Soon Die is kicked out of her town for sleeping with one of the student’s parents and sent to mysterious Linyuan Town, a place where no one speaks and everyone seems haunted. It’s hard to say exactly what happens next, let alone what it means.

It’s better to focus on the great filmmaking itself. The use of the academy ratio is inspired, realising the full cinematic and epic potential of such frames. Many people use it as an intimate shorthand, filled with small details and intense close-ups, but here we see so much more potential from the format. As the square aesthetic gives the impression of a high vertical plane, director Liao Zihao uses plenty of negative space to create some immaculate mise-en-scène, whether it’s our hero situated in the corner of the frame, seeing her subsumed by the space around her, or planimetric compositions bisected into halves and quarters, allowing us to feast on the beauty of the production design.

Fans of slow cinema — cinema that’s more about the look than the story — will be delighted. One seemingly incongruous reference to The Suspending Step of the Stork (Theodore Angelopoulos, 1991) seems to show where Zihao’s inspiration lies. The black-and-white cinematography makes the most of contrast between light and dark while casting a wide depth of frame, resulting in a genuinely transportive experience. Still, I couldn’t help feel that I would rather attend a gallery exhibition of the same frames as opposed to actually watching the sequential film again.

With mythological creatures, centaurs and angels, occasionally coming into view, as well as foggy moments that recall Kenji Mizoguchi’s ghost-like fables, there is evidently a crucial Chinese context that I am missing here — perhaps to do with ancient tales, perhaps to do with the Chinese revolution. Nonetheless, when I let my critical brain go and the images wash over me, I found some of the most assured directing from a first-time director in many years. It’s the kind of film you should go to see with your friends. Maybe if you work together, you can figure out what it’s all about.

Who is Sleeping in Silver Grey plays in the First Feature Competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12th – 28th November.

Stars Await Us

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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A Chinese man is released from prison in Siberia ahead of the New Year. HIs name is Ma Biao (Liang Jingdong) and he appears to speak not a word of the country’s language. He occupies a strange space: both coming into its own after the collapse of the Soviet Union and bordering neighbouring China, a blend of cultures and ideas yet to realise itself. A song during a concert celebrating the New Year seems to encapsulate the paradoxical nature of society: singing of a better society while praising the great state of the now collapsed Soviet Union.

Stars Await Us, a Chinese film made in Siberia, pays homage to the traditions of both Chinese and Russian national cinema. This is film in a minor key, an endless melancholic reflection of how the choices we make haunt us told in long, slow takes and long, slow movements. While occupying a runtime that recalls trends in recent Chinese cinema while filled with the nostalgia that suffuses post-Soviet cinema, it is a cross-cultural tale of great academic interest but ultimately lacking in spirit.

Liang Jingdong, a regular in the films of Chinese royalty Jia Zhang-ke, plays Ma Biao as a sad, melancholic man, searching for his ex-girlfriend Karinna (Viktoria Ivanova) — seen dancing at a club in happier times. He shares his new apartment with Su (Zakharov Evgenij Sergeevich), a local policeman who cosplays as a clown. He walks around the rapidly changing snow-filled town looking for something, often trying to strike up a conversation with a woman (Hai Qing) who sells bread from a stall. But when he walks into a local bar and sees a Russian woman performing “Blue Train” — made popular in classic Soviet animation Gena the Crocodile — this reignites his quest to find the woman he once loved. In many ways he is like his companion Cheburashka, a foreigner in a foreign place, navigating a strange world.

But don’t expect any closure, or even any explanation of why he is found himself on the wrong side of the border. Traditional narrative structures are elided in favour of panoramic, sweeping takes and elliptical storytelling. Gangsters, often the focus of Chinese cinema, especially Zhang-ke, are giving the classical Chinese treatment. In Russian cinema they would be a little in your face, here they haunt the periphery of the story, threatening violence behind every slow and well-shot corner.

While the film is undoubtedly handsomely-shot, scored by a variety of Soviet disco classics, there doesn’t seem to be much that really brings Chinese and Russian culture together. At one point Ma Biao attends a Kino concert — the famous perestroika-era band who were the face of the changing Russian society — and while watching Viktor Tsoi strut his stuff, he seems to finally let go and enjoy himself. But Viktor Tsoi, perhaps the most prominent Asian-Russian of all time, albeit of Korean descent, would die that same year in a car crash, his loss a symbol of what the new Russia could’ve been. What this means in the context of the story is hard to say, which avoids easy categorisation in favour of severe ambiguity.

These stories exploring post-Soviet legacy while remaining nostalgic for its culture have become popular in recent years, especially in film festivals such as Tallinn. And there is a case to be made for the similarities between the two cultures, which both endured communism and changed towards a capitalist system in radically different ways. But there are more succinct and heart-wrenching examples out there. From this festival alone, we could recommend Goodbye Soviet Union, also referencing Gena the Crocodile and his companion Cheburashka, as a more touching and well-packaged version of seismic post-Communist changes.

Stars Await Us plays as part of the main competition of the Tallinn Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

Great Happiness

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

The spirit of Edward Yang lives on in Great Happiness, a sad comedy from debut director Wang Yiao. Evidencing a great amount of charm, ambition and confidence in craft, it marks the arrival of a major new talent in Chinese cinema.

The story focuses on three young men, who seemed to have been left behind in the great advances of recent Chinese society. After a strange prelude — involving an advert for milk that won’t make sense until the very end of the movie — we learn that Xining’s parents were well-off during the boom times of the 90s, but at the turn of the millennium they faced a difficult future following the closing of their factory. Meanwhile, huge rows and rows of apartments dominate the landscape of the town — also (and aptly) named Xining.

He is trying to have a baby after four years of marriage, hoping to rely on a new special treatment to finish the job. Meanwhile his friend Li embodies the new monied class of young Chinese, all flash and pie-in-the-sky business ideas, hoping to become a huge business contractor. The more thoughtful Sui is an architect, with designs that buck the trends of contemporary Chinese design. Together they come up with a business idea that they hope will make them stand out in this remote corner of the world resting on the Tibetan border.

If only life was so simple. The title, Great Happiness is ironic, because there is also a great sadness that permeates every frame of this gently-shot movie. Director Wang Yiao has a strong control of tone here, making use of long takes and smart camera movements that reveal information in a satisfying piecemeal fashion. Sometimes he manages to combine two different ideas within the same shot, giving away plot developments through a simple zoom or movement to the left or right. Combined with fantastic Mise-en-scène and a great eye for comic construction and pay-off, and this is one of the most impressive debuts you will see all year.

But there is also a serious message about the capitalist state of the previously communist country. Money rules everything, with nearly every decision discussed with a minute analysis of how much it might cost and how much profit it might reap. Lies big and small constantly cloak decisions of the heart, characters deceiving one another depending on how they want themselves to be perceived. Meanwhile, there are doctors bills to be paid and plenty of characters living abroad; suggesting that the great progress of the Chinese state has left a lot of people behind.

On a superficial level, Li might represent the capitalist drive of the new China while Sui represents its old artistic soul — it’s no coincidence that his father is a Ping Pong teacher with a business in an old temple who is losing business as more and more students gravitate towards football. Xining lies somewhere in the middle; a seemingly passive character, he contains depths that aren’t revealed until the film’s final fascinating and enigmatic scene.

There is so much to say about this 150-minute film — including Sui’s romantic dilemma that provides great levity throughout the film, as well as well-layered references to the one-child policy — that simply can’t fit into this simple review. Yet despite the forbidding runtime, the movie breezes through its conflicts, creating characters that you could easily watch for three, four, maybe even five hours.

With a great appeal that bridges the gap between arthouse cinema and gentle contemporary comedy, the film has the chance to be a big hit when it’s released back in China. With a specificity that deeply locates us in that time and place while containing universal messages that resonate far beyond the Middle Kingdom’s borders, Wang Yiao has created an epic of the human heart that digs deep into the soul of the nation.

Great Happiness plays as part of the First Feature competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

Green Snake (Ching se)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

China’s White Snake legend has spawned numerous adaptations including the recent, animated White Snake / Baishe: Yuanqi (Amp Wong, Ji Zhao, 2019) which boasts fast paced action and state of the art CG visuals. Tsui Hark is from another era: the legendary Hong Kong director who almost single-handedly bought Hollywood-style special effects to Hong Kong movie production in such epics as Zu: Warriors From The Magic Mountain (1983) and the Once Upon A Time In China films (1991 onwards) alongside period romps like Peking Opera Blues (1986). For Green Snake, Tsui turned to Lillian Lee’s novel based on the White Snake legend which she adapted into a screenplay for him. Rather than tell the story from the perspective of the white snake as the original legend does, Lee shifts her narrative to the perspective of the younger, less experienced green snake.

In appearance, the two spirits start off as female humans down to the waist and snakes below, not dissimilar to Harryhausen’s half woman/half snake Medusa in Clash Of The Titans (producer and effects: Ray Harryhausen, 1981) but using full size puppetry/animatronic effects rather than stop frame animation. Because they want to enter the human world and experience romantic, sexual love, the two snakes transform themselves into full body, beautiful women.

Older white snake Bak Sei Juan (Joey Wang) and green snake younger sister Siu Ching (Maggie Cheung) initially leave their spirit world home and descend from the roof of a house in which Indian girls dance. Soon the pair swim their way up river to a more Chinese period village that could have come straight out of the Tsui-produced A Chinese Ghost Story /Sien lui yau wan (Ching Siu Tung, 1987, in which Joey Wang played an attractive ghost) where they both ingratiate themselves with a local scholar Hsui-Xien (Wu Hsing Kuo) with white Bak Sei intent of having his children while green snake Siu Ching goes off to seduce a Buddhist monk Fa Hai (Vincent Zhao) – whose two hundred years worth of studies have allowed him to run through the air and master various other physical and spiritual abilities – intent on banishing the pair from the human world back to the spirit world.

As you might expect from the director who in Zu: Warriors staged a priest keeping a demonic asteroid at bay using several thousand yards of eyebrows, Green Snake boasts extraordinary set pieces. These vary from shots of the two girls cavorting naked in a period hot tub (not that they reveal anything much, but the images positively drip sex) through various gigantic snake tails swishing about through water or in the air, epic airborne battles with the flying monks and a finale in which the monk’s red clothing is transformed into a vast shroud with which he and a magic crane which suddenly appears from nowhere battle the two flying snake women.

Memorable episodes include green Maggie Cheung trying to seduce the monk by gliding through the air around him while he attempts to concentrate poised in mid-air at being sexually pure and not distracted by her presence. The whole thing has a gorgeous Chinese score and the art direction makes you feel as if you’ve got lost inside a full colour version of the willow pattern plate, but an original Chinese version not some Western re-imagining. And while the men are standard comic fodder (the scholar) and equally standard flying monk action hero, the two women / reptiles are voluptuous sirens at one point mirrored by an army of women moving on all fours who besiege the monk.

While it’s recognisably a Tsui Hark film, at the same time he isn’t really repeating himself here: there’s nothing else in his body of work quite like this.

Green Snake plays in LEAFF, The London East Asia Film Festival as a late item in their Dilemma And Desire strand followed by a panel discussion.

Castle Cinema, Saturday, November 16th, 18.00. More information, and book here.

Watch a trailer for the film below:

and a promo which arguably represents it more accurately:

White Snake (Baishe: Yuanqi)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Conceived as a prequel to China’s White Snake legend which has spawned numerous adaptations including Green Snake / Ching se (Tsui Hark, 1993), this computer animated Chinese epic concerns demon sisters Blanca and Verta (voiced by Zhang Zhe and Tang Xiaoxi) who look to all intents and purposes like beautiful women but are actually demon snakes in disguise – a white snake and a green snake as you might guess from their names. With her power and form enhanced by her sister’s gift of a green hairpin, Blanca leaves the demon world and visits ours for a showdown with a human General trying to prove his worth to the Emperor by dabbling in occult rituals involving snakes. When the showdown doesn’t go as planned, Blanca finds herself alone and suffering a complete loss of memory as to who (and indeed what) she is.

She awakes in a small, human, rural village where the local economy is built on catching snakes for the General. Local boy Sean (Yang Tianxiang) has no interest in catching snakes, spending his time instead sourcing toys for the local children or inventing things. Smitten with the amnesiac Blanca, Sean is astonished when by magic she rescues his dog Dudou from falling off a mountain ledge and by further magic gives the animal a human voice. Sean eagerly scrambles after Blanca as she flies up perilous mountain terrain, trying hard to look beyond her growing a snake’s tail when she does so, preferring to think of her as a woman rather than a demon.

It’s a strange and somehow very Chinese combination of creature feature, mythology and full on romance with the girl torn between the human and demon realms and the boy trying to justify his feelings for her. The physical effects work that Hong Kong would have been used 25 years ago is replaced by CGI which is generally of a higher standard than you would expect. As well as the two sisters, the snakes include a whole army of snake people whose cinematic origins go right back to Ray Harryhausen’s human-torsoed, snake-tailed Medusa in Clash Of The Titans (1981) and his similarly built, dancing girl in The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad (1958). The snake people’s leader, much like the two sisters, switches between woman and snake, in her case an ethereal, yellow fire snake.

Equally inventive is the creature that pulls the General’s chariot, which looks like a crane with three heads. Other highlights include a spectacular firebird and malevolent black manifestations of the General’s dark magic. When Sean and Blanca reach the forge where the green hairpin was made, they meet another demon in the form of a woman with two faces, one human and, when she turns round, one fox.

The whole thing is beautifully paced with never a dull moment. Full blooded romantics will be struck by a memorable ending which throws into the mix Chinese concepts of reincarnation. Anyone who enjoyed the action movies coming out of Hong Kong in their halcyon days of the eighties and nineties prior to Hollywood’s co-opting such stunts for The Matrix (The Wachowski Brothers, 1999) will love this. Hong Kong did some amazing stunts using aerial wire work back then, but that will only get you so far and White Snake puts CGI to full and highly effective use, getting the most out of the medium and achieving things that would be near impossible in live action. So, to all intents and purposes an old school Hong Kong action fantasy redone as computer animation – and it works wonderfully. A joy.

White Snake played in the BFI London Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. On Amazon Prime from February (2021).

So Long My Son

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

It’s not uncommon for a film festival to leave its crowning jewel for near the end of the festival, and Berlinale 2019 may just have found theirs in the form of So Long, My Son, the epic (in terms of both content and duration; the film has 180 minutes) family saga tearjerker from Chinese Wang Xiaoshuai. Across four decades of turbulent Chinese society, Wang studies a married couple, using the death of their son as a focal point around which to subtly explore the single-child policy and the impact of the Cultural Revolution.

The unconventional structure zips back and forth through different time frames, gradually moving along a central timeline. The story occurs in episodes which each have the feel of their own short story, but which fill in the details of the other things we have seen. Wang leans heavily on dramatic irony, raising the tension as we wait for truths to emerge. One wonders if he couldn’t have found a way to cut 15 minutes or so from the run time, so languid are the first two hours. It isn’t until the final 50 minutes that So Long My Son really pays off every beat he’s set up. Like a Koreeda film, revelation is piled upon revelation, disarming you with one bombshell and then slapping you with another. Wang even uses the flashbacks to abet this by undercutting the outcome of one scene with the reality of the past or present.

The seriousness and the attention to naturalistic detail allows for slight detours into almost hallucinogenic images of memory. After the central couple go looking for their missing adopted son in a thunderstorm, they return to their flooded house and the family photograph floats towards them as though Baby Moses in the basket. When that boy is a little older we meet his punk, motorbike riding friends, who hang around the family house and appear like a mad apparition before the trash heap landscape. It’s a nod by Wang to the drifter youths he depicted in his earlier films.

Sometimes Wang takes the distance of a public spectacle. He rhymes shots by framing corridors in a particular way to remind you of a particular day in the lives of the characters, and repeatedly uses the Scottish poem Auld Lang Syne to haunting effect. Occasionally he’ll follow a peripheral character from this incredible ensemble cast and reveal their hidden depths. Then it ends with a note of blissfully ignorant hope, which recalls Make Way For Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937) in its graceful affection. This is challenging in its length and bleakness, and probably won’t find much of a cinema life in the UK, but it should, because So Long My Son is one of the most skilful and rewarding films of the competition, and a guaranteed tearjerker.

So Long My Son showed at the Berlinale in February, when this piece was originally written. It won both the Best Actors and Best Actress prizes. In cinemas Friday, December 6th. On VoD in April. On Mubi in July/August

ManHunt (Zhui bu)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The late Japanese actor Ken Takakura who died in 2014 appeared in more than 200 films and made his name playing ex-cons and gangsters for Toei studios between the mid-fifties and mid-seventies. He was a major inspiration for Hong Kong director John Woo who here remakes the 1976 Takakura vehicle Manhunt.

Du Qiu (Chinese actor Zhang Hanyu) finds himself in a Japanese bar swapping notes on movies with the mama-san Rain (Korea’s Ha Ji-won). Almost immediately, a loutish group of men in suits storm into the same bar to demand he leaves so she can give them her full attention. Once he’s gone, Rain and her partner Dawn (the director’s daughter Angeles Woo) proceed to gun down the suits, the camera whirling around them as Woo choreographs the mayhem.

Du is a lawyer working for a pharma company. The morning after a huge corporate event he wakes up to find a dead woman (Tao Okamoto) lying next to him in his bed. Implicated in her murder, he goes on the run. A cop Yamura (Fukuyama Masaharu from Like Father, Like Son, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2013) is assigned to catch him. Eventually after a series of pursuits and confrontations, the fugitive convinces the cop of his innocence and the two men join forces to clear Du’s name. As well as the two female assassins, they must contend with the villainous corporate head Sakai Yoshihiro (Kunimura Jun) and his insecure son Sakai Hiroshi (Ikeuchi Hiroyuki) plus the vengeful widow (Qi Wei) of a deceased research scientist.

Woo builds one incredible action set piece upon another which he perfectly integrates into his visual storytelling and bravura cinematic style. Numerous eye-popping fights, car chases and shoot outs pepper the thrilling proceedings while a sniper sequence and speedboat chase recall similar scenes from his masterpiece The Killer (1989). The contemporary Japanese backdrop, players and crew give the whole thing a clean, high tech feel and it’s refreshing to see female as well as male characters participate equally in the action: a shift in mores since the more male-oriented days of A Better Tomorrow (1986) or Hard Boiled (1992) twenty-five years ago.

In the end though, action and character are the thing. Holding to the maxim that action is character, Woo defines his protagonists by the way they look at each other, handle a gun or leap through the air, refining his directorial delivery via every tool at his disposal in his cinematic arsenal. The acting required on a John Woo production might be a lot more full on and physical than that demanded by most other directors, but the cast here rise to the considerable challenge thrown at them and acquit themselves well. It’s been a long time since John Woo has made anything like this: the result is a most welcome return to form.

ManHunt was a late addition to the BFI London Film Festival. Hopefully some enterprising UK distributor will snap it up and get it out there on screens before long. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook, and we’ll keep you posted!