Tag: mahjong

The Crossing (Guo Chun Tian)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Sixteen-year-old Peipei (Huang Yao) lives in Shenzhen, but goes to school in neighbouring Hong Kong. She has to cross the China-Hong Kong border on a daily basis, waved through by border officials with better things to do than stop, question or search schoolgirls. She lives in a cramped apartment. Her father is rarely there because he works the night shift at a shipping yard, where she sometimes visits him. Her gambling mother often invites friends over to play Mahjong.

The family of Peipei’s best friend from school Jo (Carmen Soup) are clearly much better off judging by their huge, modern house in Hong Kong, which contains a large fish tank housing a dogfish (amongst other things). Jo has plans for her and Peipei to go to Japan and Peipei is trying to work out how to make some money to pay for the trip. She finds minimum wage work in a restaurant after school hours.

One day, Peipei stumbles upon what Jo’s boyfriend Hao (Sunny Sun) does for money: he and fellow gang members smuggle iPhones across the border. As someone who goes back and forth across that border every weekday, Peipei realises she’s in the perfect position to exploit this. Her face seems to fit with the gang and she starts to make money, chaperoned by both Hao and his older generation boss Sister Hua (Elena Kong).

As its title indicates, this is a film about crossing lines. Both literal and metaphorical ones. In much the same way that Peipei is constantly going back and forth over the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border, she must also cross and sometimes return over a number of moral and spiritual borders: child-adult, schoolgirl-worker, traveller-smuggler, unarmed-armed, innocent-criminal, platonic-romantic.

Director Bai signals the more troublesome of these crossings via the device of a freeze frame and a short bass guitar riff to indicate that a line has been traversed and her heroine can never be the same again. Peipei is caught between her own humble background and the desire to be part of Jo’s more affluent one, finding herself in a criminal underworld that acts as a potential thoroughfare to link these other two worlds.

The plot takes some satisfying detours along the way. When Peipei accidentally drops one iPhone of a larger shipment onto railway tracks she then has to find a way of getting its broken screen repaired before delivering the complete batch to her designated gang contact. Later, after taking exception to seeing Jo’s family dogfish in captivity, she releases it into the waters of the harbour.

While Hong Kong has a strong tradition of fast-paced, generally male-dominated gangland action movies, The Crossing delivers something very different – essentially a character study about innocence, transgression and personal corruption centred around a female protagonist. After Huang’s deceptively simple portrayal of Peipei and her carefree friendship with Jo has initially drawn the viewer in, the performances of Sun as Hao and those playing his fellow gang members exert a similar pull on both the audience and Peipei herself. Elena Kong is particularly good as the seemingly easygoing and friendly lady boss who when it comes to the crunch can be extremely hard and ruthless protecting her business interests.

In short, this is an impressive coming of age tale with all the trappings of a teenage crime drama wrapped up in a compelling, slow-burner of a character study. Well worth seeing.

The Crossing was out in UK cinemas in March, 2019. It also played in the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF), when this piece was originally written. It is streaming at the Chinese Cinema Season UK, taking place between February and May (2021)

Big Fish & Begonia (Dayu Haitang)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Around the age of 16, people in the spirit world must visit the world of the humans, with whom they are warned not to interact, as a rite of passage. Thus it is that teenage spirit girl Chun must pass through the elemental maelstrom linking her world and ours whereupon she is transformed into a red dolphin and made to spend seven days in the seas of the human world. On her sixth day, she hears a teenage boy play a dolphin-shaped flute to his sister; on her seventh she sees blue dolphins struggling in a fishing net. Her return to her world is blocked when she becomes entangled in a net between her and the whirlpool until the boy rescues her only to be himself fatally sucked into that whirlpool. This is more or less how the Chinese animation Big Fish & Begonia sets off.

Safely back in the spirit world, Chun understandably feels she owes him a debt so trades half her life to a soul keeper in exchange for that of the boy: she must nurture the boy’s soul which will be given the form of a fish in her world and release him back into the human world when the fish reaches adulthood, at which point she will die but he will live. She names the fish/boy Kun after a legendary sea creature of immense size.

There’s a lot more to it than that: firstly, an unrequited love story introduces teenage spirit boy Qiu who fancies Chun and looks out for her even though she treats him like no more than her big brother. Then, while the old aged male soul keeper watches over the souls of departed good people incarnated as fish, his equally old female counterpart watches over the souls of departed bad people incarnated as mice. Chun’s late grandma is reborn as a phoenix; her beloved grandpa, a Begonia tree. Also in the mix are a deadly two-headed snake, a mystical stone dragon and an unearthly ferryman who steers his barge along the clouds. And while in the human world the red dolphins swim among the seas, in the spirit world they soar through the skies along with cranes and dragons.

The whole is rendered in beautifully drawn animation as effective at portraying in the heroine’s internal life as it is in bringing incredible landscapes and fantastic creatures to the screen. The pace is mesmerisingly slow in places, breathtakingly action-packed in others. Where else can you see a girl sell half her life to save someone else’s, a man play mah-jong against three other versions of himself or the terrible portent of snow falling in the middle of Summer? For the finale, it throws in cataclysmic floods and waterspouts descending from the skies.

The production, which was intermittently on then off for some 13 years, was ultimately promoted by posts on Weibo (China’s answer to Twitter) then financed by China-based crowdfunding. Very much an indie production by two directors with a unique vision, it’s a landmark entry in the annals of fantasy film and animated storytelling which deserves to be widely seen. Its limited UK and Irish release means you’ll need to make a special effort to see it. You should do so though because this magnificent home-grown Chinese offering demonstrates just how tired and formulaic most Hollywood fantasy and/or animated films are. Don’t miss.

Oh, and be warned there’s a key scene buried in the middle of the end credits.

Big Fish & Begonia is out in the UK on Wednesday, April 18th. It is screening in both subtitled (independent cinemas) and dubbed (Showcase Cinemas) versions. We recommend the subtitled version as screened to press. Click here to see where it is being screened. Watch the film trailer below:

Subtitled:

Dubbed: