MCLC: Jia Zhangke's Touch of Sin arrives in US

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: Jia Zhangke's Touch of Sin arrives in US
***********************************************************

Source: China File (9/27/13):
http://www.chinafile.com/can-china-s-leading-indie-film-director-cross-over
-america

Can China’s Leading Indie Film Director Cross Over in America?
By Jonathan Landreth

Chinese writer and director Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin won the prize for
the best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Though the
dialogue and its fine translation and English subtitles by Tony Rayns are
exemplary, I found that as the screening room lights came up I was left
thinking most about what the film does not say.

A Touch of Sin will have its North American premiere on September 28 at
the New York Film Festival and will go on to a limited release by
distributor Kino Lorber on October 4 in New York, October 11 in Los
Angeles and November 15 in Chicago.

As have many of Jia’s previous films have done—Platform, in particular,
rushes to mind—A Touch of Sin leaves plenty of silent time and space from
which the audience must draw conclusions about that which they’ve just
eyewitnessed.

Jia’s new work is a powerful, fictionalized weaving together of the true
stories of three recent murders and a suicide that took place across
China. These are brutal and sad stories about which American audiences
will have heard little or nothing. A Touch of Sin is important in that
regard. It tackles the violence of China’s society head on.

But Jia leaves out what happens to killers after their crimes.

As such, I can’t wait to see Jia during his live public appearance at the
Asia Society in New York on September 30, a visit that will afford
Gotham’s committed audience of sino- and cinephiles a chance to ask him
why he skipped that part of the discussion of crime and punishment in
China, the country that, according to the Dui Hui Foundation, executes
more human beings each year than any other on earth
<http://www.duihua.org/work/publications/nl/nl_pdf/nl_41.pdf>.

Don't get me wrong: Jia's focus in A Touch of Sin on the conditions that
drive each of the film’s four protagonists to their bloody deeds is a
courageous use of the medium. In China, citizens often are impugned or
punished for using mass media to expose the injustice that often drives
people to violence. The mere making of the film challenges the facade of
harmonious society that Chinese authorities labor to maintain.

But I was left wondering if Jia left out the capture, trial and punishment
of the killers in the film because a frank portrayal of China’s criminal
justice system is still too sensitive for the censors?

Perhaps. In recent days China’s popular weibo microblogs have hosted an
outpouring of discussion of the execution of an impoverished street vendor
who claimed he killed in self defense. Threads of the heated online
discussion have touched upon the case of Gu Kailai, the powerful
businesswoman who was sentenced to prison for murder, thus escaping the
death penalty, just like her husband, Bo Xilai, who last week got life in
jail for corruption, abuse of power and bribery.

Because A Touch of Sin shines a harsh light on different levels of despair
at different rungs of China’s socio-economic ladder, I, for one, will be
surprised if the graphically gory two-hour-and-five-minute film makes it
on to screens in mainland China in its entirely, escaping the censors
blade.

“Thanks for your concern,” Jia wrote to inquiring fans on weibo on
September 26. “The domestic release team and I have been trying since May
to release A Touch of Sin in China, yet it is an extremely complicated
task 
<http://www.tealeafnation.com/2012/09/director-reveals-mystery-of-chinas-fi
lm-censorship-system-on-weibo/>. Almost ninety percent of our efforts are
focused on domestic release. The film is projected to be released
domestically in November, and we're still striving for this.”

That A Touch of Sin is getting a release at all in the United States is an
accomplishment. The violence and despair at injustice at the heart of the
film could put viewers in mind of the raging American gun-control debate.
If A Touch of Sin sparked even a little bit of American identification
with the discussion of crime and punishment going on a world and an
Internet away I'd call it a hit.

RESPONSES:

Michael Berry:

As far as indie cinema goes, Jia Zhangke has already made it. Almost all
of his films made over the course of the past decade have been distributed
in the U.S., he has been awarded some of the most important international
film prizes, retrospectives on his body of work have run at MoMA
<http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/films/1046> and elsewhere, and during
the past several years more academic articles have been published on his
work than perhaps any other Chinese filmmaker. In this sense, Jia has
already been hugely successful in both America as well as many other
countries around the globe. His success is also increasingly not just
predicated on his own films, but his contributions as a cultural critic,
writer, lecturer, and producer.

Of course, for some “making it” is measured by a different set of
criteria—directing a top U.S. box-office grossing film like Hero or
becoming a pop sensation like PSY—but that is not the game Jia is playing.
That is not to say he doesn’t have a good chance of one day winning an
Academy Award for best foreign language film or, given the recent surge of
Hollywood-China collaborations, helming a big budget co-production, but,
at their core, his films still have an independent spirit that is more
concerned with exploring the limits of cinematic form and the depths of
the human condition than with conquering international box office receipts.

Jaime Wolf:

Leaving aside for a second the film's deserved New York Film Festival
hoopla, the welcome presence of Jia and his wife, the film's star actress
Zhao Tao, in New York, and a national release in the U.S., I want to say
that I'm especially eager to see what happens with the release of A Touch
of Sin on the mainland-- I think in some real way its reception and fate
in China is almost the only story where the film is concerned.
 
For one thing, I think if the censors at SARFT (or whatever its new
steroidally-enhanced acronym is) try to suppress it, that would only work
to Jia's advantage and create interest and buzz around the film that might
not otherwise exist.

Given the tone, pacing and general sobriety of Jia's films (despite the
sensational and truly shocking aspects of this one), counterposed with the
wholesale embrace of commercial fluff at the mainland box office, part of
me thinks that if the government were simply to stand back and let the
film into theaters, it might actually fall into an art-film black hole
while Chinese audiences are busy queueing up for the next installment of
Tiny Times.  The fact that virtually no other mainland director has
license to engage seriously with issues of contemporary life in China
could work for Jia, and he'll draw a crowd (it could be the Chinese
Natural Born Killer or it could go the opposite way, where audiences won't
see the appeal and just stay away.  I have no idea what Jia's production
company Xstream and the Shanghai Film Group are doing to promote the film,
or to what extent the outspoken posters on weibo also plunk down their
hard-earned RMB at the multiplex, and I'd really like to know.