MCLC: unhinged in China

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: unhinged in China
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Source: NY Review of Books (10/25/13):
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/oct/25/unhinged-china/

Unhinged in China
Ian Johnson

In one of the central scenes in Jia Zhangke’s new film, a young man
working in the southern Chinese manufacturing city of Dongguan goes to an
ATM and finds that he’s broke. He’s just spent the past month betraying
his friends and hopping from job to job, including one as a tuxedoed
servant in a brothel where he watched the woman he loves perform for
clients. Standing in a daze in front of the bank, he gets a call from his
mother, who harasses him for money and then berates him for having none.
We see the man’s lips quiver and tears well up as he realizes that he has
no one he can trust or love, no family, and no friends. A few hours later,
he jumps out of the window of the huge housing block for migrant workers
where he has been staying, and falls to his death.

This sort of honesty is so rare in Chinese films today that’s it’s
shocking to see it in a mainstream production. A Touch of Sin isn’t likely
to be a commercial success—indeed, it’s still hasn’t been released in
China—but Jia does not consider himself a dissident filmmaker and there is
talk that it may be released in China. (The film has already won the 2013
Cannes Film Festival award for best screenplay and is now showing in
limited release in the United States.)

The film is made up of four interlocking stories that are meant to
encompass the geographic sweep of China, and what Jia sees as the epidemic
of violence and amorality in modern Chinese life. All the stories are
about members of China’s working classes, victims of social change who end
up as violent desperados—modern-day knights trying to avenge large-scale
wrongs. Interwoven are other themes that few other Chinese directors would
touch: the destruction of traditions and religions, for example, or
cruelty toward animals. It’s one of the few films out of China in recent
years with ambition—and made by someone with enough talent to pull it off.

The film is consciously made in the wuxia martial arts genre; the English
title is an homage to the 1971 film A Touch of Zen by the Taiwanese
director King Hu, which stars a reluctant fighter named Ku. (The Chinese
title of Jia’s film, Tianzhuding, means “doomed by fate.”) Like Ku and
other classic martial arts heroes, the characters in A Touch of Sin mostly
choose violence as a last resort. Jia also uses other wuxia techniques
like compressed time sequences and stylized violent scenes.

But the film’s structure and plot owe more to traditional storytelling,
showing particular affinities to the Water Margin, a Ming-dynasty classic
novel that tells of outlaws who are bound by honor and brotherhood. Like
the various episodes recounted in the Water Margin, the stories around
which the film are based are true, but the work as a whole is fiction. Jia
has said he wants to explain the violence by going more deeply into the
characters’ personal lives than the bare facts of their cases allow. This
is one of the film’s strengths; we are made to see in these portraits some
of the hollowness behind China’s material prosperity. Especially
noticeable are the lack of warm relations between people, something
Chinese call renqing and which they prize as an essential part of Chinese
culture. Like the character standing in front of the ATM, these are people
whose material progress has come at the expense of stable, strong human
bonds.

Another major inspiration for the film is China’s growing social media
culture, such as Sina’s Weibo, a Twitter-like form of microblogging that
has become a major source of information for many Chinese. With over 500
million registered users, Weibo is a popular platform for discussion of
everything from movie stars to social problems, such as pollution or
income inequality. In recent months, however, the government has been
cracking down on people accused of spreading rumors and Weibo has been
less lively than in past years.

In a discussion this fall at The Asia Society in New York
<http://asiasociety.org/new-york/filmmaker-jia-zhangke-confronts-everyday-v
iolence-touch-sin>, Jia explained that through Weibo, people have come to
realize that phenomena that they thought were local—corrupt officials,
ecological destruction, shady business operations designed to enrich a
few—are actually widespread. “The presence of Weibo has changed the way we
understand China,” Jia said. “Before Weibo, people tended to think these
incidents were made up or were isolated. But after Weibo, and every other
day you’ll see something like this happening in China.”

Several of the stories Jia has chosen to tell in A Touch of Sin are
well-known in China because of Weibo, such as the local official who beat
a woman with wads of cash, insisting she sleep with him, finally provoking
her to attack him with a knife. The film also draws on recent cases of
suicides and gun rampages, hired assassins and slashers.

Much of the time, Jia’s approach is effective, especially in the film’s
first and fourth stories. Both are layered and ambiguous. In the first, a
villager becomes unhinged after a mafia-style elite backed by the local
party boss take over the local coal mine, which had been collectively
owned. The villager is on a crusade to end a gross injustice, and his
story is emblematic of how state firms are often looted by a small elite
who get fabulously wealthy. But he is not rational. He walks around the
village announcing to everyone that he is going to report the local party
leadership to highers-up in Beijing but never figures out how to do this;
at one point he walks into a post office and tries to send an unaddressed
letter to the central government. Humiliated, he eventually takes matters
into his own hands.

Not all of the film is equally successful. Part of the problem is the
characters’ continual—and often very quick—recourse to violence, a
pathology that Jia seems to be using to draw broader conclusions about
where Chinese society is headed. Despite the frequency of such incidents
appearing on Weibo, however, it’s not clear that violence is on the rise
in China. Jia’s vision of his country is reminiscent of that of worried
Americans, who are sure that their cities are rampant with crime, even
though crime rates have fallen steadily for decades. In China, street
crime is more common than it was in the Mao era, but Chinese cities are
safe and killings rare. The echoing effect of social media may be
distorting our perception, raising some of the same questions we may ask
about the rise in reported rapes in the West: does it mean rape is
increasing, or that more people are reporting it, or simply that reports
of it can now spread faster and more widely? Increased reporting is
important, as it implies changing social norms, but Jia seems to be
arguing the harder-to-prove point that violence in China is up based on
the notoriously unscientific indications of social media postings.

This approach lends his storytelling a sensational feel. At times, his
characters seem as if they might have come from the pages of publications
like the Legal Evening News <http://www.fawan.com/>, a Chinese newspaper
popular for its lurid crime stories. Like these reports, or their social
media versions on Weibo, Jia’s four stories are highly abbreviated and
leave out some of the inner lives that he hopes his artistic renderings
can reveal. The second story, for example, is about a murderous robber who
doesn’t seem to have any redeeming features. Like the other protagonists,
he comes from a cold, unloving family but seems motivated mainly by
boredom. It’s difficult to reconcile this character with the martial arts
heroes of old, who Jia says are his inspirations. The third story is
probably meant to be the centerpiece—not least because it features Jia’s
muse and wife, the actress Zhao Tao—but it’s relatively predictable and
psychologically flat. From the moment the spurned lover accidentally ends
up with a switchblade in her backpack, one ends up counting the minutes
until she kills someone with it.

The film’s ending is also unsatisfying. In an effort to link the stories
more directly, Jia has Zhao Tao’s character suddenly show up in the
coal-mining town from the first piece looking for a job. Few of the
details seem plausible—she is too old to be a migrant, she would never
have gone to the poor town looking for work, and the would-be employers
recognize her as having been in the news in some sort of bad way but hire
her anyway. It’s all a bit forced.

And yet it’s hard not to see A Touch of Sin as one of the best Chinese
films in recent years. It weaves in classical opera, rediscovered
religious traditions, and the anomie of the migrant condition lived by
millions of Chinese, even for those who can afford China’s new high-speed
rail system, in which people seem to glide from one reality to the next in
sequences of almost magical-realist beauty.
As for whether the film will be released in China, Jia is hopeful:

When I sent the film to the censor bureau, one of the censors in private
told me, “Personally speaking, I really, really like this film.” So I said
to him, “You shouldn’t split your personality when you’re doing your job.”