MCLC: TIFF 2011: China cinema rising, 1

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Shelly Kraicer <shellyk at mac.com>
Subject:  TIFF 2011: China cinema rising, 1
************************************************************

[cross-posted from Chinese Cinema Digest]

Here is the first of a two-part article on the 2011 Toronto International
FIlm Festival (8-18 September 2011). The first section reviews mainland
Chinese films at TIFF. The second section, to follow in the next digest,
discusses films from Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Shelley Kraicer

============================================================

TIFF 2011: China cinema rising
by Shelly Kraicer

The Toronto International Film Festival has big plans for Chinese movies.
The Chinese film industry continues to expand in sync with (if not exactly
in proportion to) the exponential growth in the number of screens being
built in China [see this fun account by Eric Hynes in Slate:
<http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2011/11/watching_captain_america
_in_a_beijing_multiplex_.single.html>].
Among TIFF's many missions (and arguably its most important, these days)
is working hard to establish itself as the central marketplace for world
cinema (Cannes notwithstanding). So an opening up to Chinese commercial
cinema would fit that mandate. It will be interesting to see how well the
new Chinese popular cinema -- i.e. films deemed suitable for release by
the Chinese government censors --  travel to major international festivals
like Toronto.

This year's crop of mainland Chinese films (I'll discuss a couple of
Taiwanese and Hong Kong films later) were mostly taken from the "artistic
drama" middle range of Chinese film production. No new blockbusters were
in evidence this year.

Art house and festival favourite Wang Xiaoshuai's 11 FLOWERS (Wo shi yi)
received its world premiere at TIFF. Wang's own opening voiceover
announces that this this work is based on autobiography: it is certainly
his most personal film to date. It is also his most successful film in ten
years. Set in 1975, one year before the end of the Cultural Revolution, in
Wansheng, a small town in the Chongqing region of Sichuan, it parallels
his own youthful experiences while an eleven year-old growing up in
China's interior. His parents, like his stand-in in the film, Wang Han's,
were relocated, along with many other former Shanghaiers, to remote
interior cities in the early 1960s. This was part of Mao Zedong's "third
front" policy of establishing safely remote bases in China's interior for
strategic industries under what was perceived to be the threat of Soviet
invasion. These displaced urban communities contained many members who
retained a strong sense of their previous urban identities while living in
this sort of internal industrial "exile". In fact, Wang's film Shanghai
Dreams (Qing Hong, 2005) investigated a more fictionalized version  of
this dilemma, in which a family of Guizhou residents dreamed of returning
to their Shanghai homes.

In his new film, Wang's voice over announces that he finds it necessary to
stop dreaming others' lives and start facing his own. So he tells a story
of Wang Han, his eleven year-old fictionalized self who, along with four
classmates, navigates through a community riven by political, sexual, and
familial tensions. Despite the stated urgency of facing reality, Wang
Xiaoshuai has opted for a smooth, seamless, fictionalized packaging that
transforms his lived experience into something like an idealized,
perfectly well-designed, impeccably dramatic whole. There is a dramatic
arc constructed around Wang Han's involvement with a mysterious female
schoolmate and the subsequent murder of her rapist by her brother.
Performances by the young cast (especially the young boys playing Wang and
his buddies Louse, Mouse, and Weijun) are charming: engaging and well
modulated. The entire film displays a smooth mastery of narrative pacing,
acting, and art direction (vividly evoking the mid-1970s period) and
cinematography, all functioning together as tightly regulated narrative
machine that catches an audience immediately and knits us into the drama
of the story, investing emotionally in the fates of the characters.

So what's missing? Despite Wang Xiaoshuai's explicit invocation of real
life as necessary basis for the renewal of his filmmaking, reality is
substantially sealed out. The film labours so masterfully to exclude
precisely what one might call "real life". The drama is shaped, the shots
are designed and selected, the performers are coached to mesh together
into a very vivid, engaging simulation of reality, one that's dramatically
clean and effective. But messy details, a sense of real life's confusion
and complications, are left out. There is no room to breathe in this kind
of filmmaking; it delivers exactly what it wants to deliver. That's
certainly admirable as craft, as professionalized filmmaking. But it is
also symptomatic of filmmakers like Wang, who have moved from independent
filmmaking to production within the system. The tough engagement with
reality that he and the other leading sixth generation directors pioneered
in the early 1990s has yielded, through a complex process of
professionalization, compromise, co-optation, maturity, and
internationally-directed coproduction (in Wang's case traceable I think to
the international success of Beijing Bicycle (Shiqisui de danche, 2001))
to something more marketable though less vital. That's a choice that
directors like him are free to make, of course. But while I admire his
success in meeting these goals in 11 Flowers, I miss even more the
original programme that he and his colleagues once dedicated themselves to.

One of Wang Xiaoshuai's "sixth generation" colleagues, Lou Ye, is having a
successful career as an international festival filmmaker, even as he
counted down the filmmaking ban imposed by the Chinese government
following the unauthorized screening of his very unauthorized Summer
Palace (Yiheyuan) at Cannes in 2006. Well, the ban is over, and I hope
that means he will return to mainland-based filmmaking soon. His new film
LOVE AND BRUISES (Hua) managed to secure a premiere at the Venice Film
Festival sidebar Venice Days. I wonder how influenced Lou was by perhaps
an excessively thorough immersion into that international, specifically
French, art house genre called amour fou. This is the kind of cinema that
imagines it can conflate misogynistic sexual violence with courage,
daring, and poetry. This is a shame, because Lou Ye is perhaps the most
prodigiously visually gifted of his sixth generation colleagues. His films
have sustained a remarkably daring (in a Chinese cinema context) interest
in the political erotics of relationships; Lou is willing to venture into
the kind of dark, sexually mature material that few of his Chinese
colleagues know how to explore. But not with this new film.

Love and Bruises finally offered me a chance to test a pet theory: that
Lou Ye can only find complete cinematic freedom his style demands by
dropping the explicit politics overlaying his recent films (Purple
Butterfly, Summer Palace, Spring Fever) and just shooting the sex. Well,
he shoots the sex all over Love and Bruises, and my theory proved very,
very wrong; there's not a lot of freedom here, except that of the male
fantasist. The sexual politics underlying Lou's new work are, how shall we
say, problematic. The female character, Hua (Corinne Yam, deliberately
inexpressive) loves macho inarticulate Mathieu (Tahar Rahim, convincingly
brutish) precisely because he abuses her, forces her, cheats her, pimps
her (to an even more violent rapist-friend who serves, I suppose, to make
Mathieu seem less repellent via some kind of nasty moral triangulation).
She also cooks and cleans, between frequent bouts of fucking that are shot
far too tamely to hint at the kind of feral circulation of sexual desire
that might account for the persistence of the couple's relationship.

Lou's d.p. Yu Lik-wai is a great cinematographer, and his gritty Paris
(and tatty French countryside) are refreshingly lacking in cinema-Paris
glossy fakeness. But every time his mobile camera tries to catch a
strikingly illuminated face, offering a door to deeper character, Hua and
Mathieu offer nothing. The fact that Mathieu is a working class Parisian
resentful of Hua's bourgeois intellectual privilege adds something; the
fact that he and his violent buddy (a charismatically malevolent Jalil
Lesper) are presumably French of Arab origin makes the film's
post-colonial allegorical possibilities rather more complex (and
potentially noxious) than the straightforward schema Lou might have used:
white French guy sexually abusing a Chinese woman into love and
subservience. The story's late, weird turn to Beijing depressurizes the
film, like a balloon rapidly losing air. But it does offer delightfully
unexpected glimpses of my pro-democracy intellectual friends at the
Beijing Film Academy. So maybe Lou really can't stay away from politics
after all.

One film at Toronto offered a relatively indie vibe inside a government
approval-ready package: Han Jie's MR TREE (Hello! Shu Xiansheng). Han
Jie's first film, Walking on the Wild Side (Lai xiaozi, 2006) was a
typical (one might even say stereotypical) unauthorized Chinese indie film
about hopeless youths in a dead-end town drawn to violence and sex. His
new film, like the first, was produced by Jia Zhangke and his company
XStream Pictures. XStream and Jia himself have carefully, and for the most
part extremely cleverly, moved across the boundary separating unauthorized
from authorized filmmaking in China. Mr Tree shows one way it's done. It's
a part realistic, part fantastical tale of a young man, Shu (the Mr Tree
of the title) and his attempts to imagine a better life for himself.  Shu
is trapped. He is haunted by family violence in his past (the ghost of his
murdered brother appears to half-eerie, half-comic effect at key points in
the story); and he yearns to find a way to a bigger world outside his
village. The setting is similar to Walking, a seemingly dead-end town in
China's Dongbei region (the vast Northeastern "rust belt"). Worse than
dead-end, the village is being quite literally undermined by a
quasi-hoodlum buddy of Shu's whose mining company wants the coal under his
hometown's houses.

Shu's response to his predicament (or perhaps it's the cause? a subtle,
patient unfolding of the intricate relationships between social
environment and character are something to treasure in this film) is to
adopt unusual behavior: he's hilariously eccentric, deeply wounded,
borderline mentally deficient, uncontrollably scrappy, but in certain,
imaginative ways, wildly creative. The character actor Wang Baoqiang does
a brilliant (and award-winning) job creating this weirdly charismatic
shaman figure, in a performance as much dance and incantation --
dangerously windmilling arms, canted body, spiraling voice, and
anywhere-but-straight-ahead stare -- as acting.

In terms of structure and character logic, Mr Tree is nowhere near as
smooth or professionally taut as Wang Xiaoshuai's feature. It has a
romance/marriage plot that appears and disappears rather abruptly,
awkwardly evoking sometimes romance, sometimes social satire. But the film
has something that Wang Xiaoshuai's movie shuts out: a kind of weird,
off-balance daring, a willingness to play with registers of reality,
quasi-reality, and non-reality. This opens access to something dangerous,
unexpected, and provocative that, for me at least, left a deeper
impression. It's fascinating that Han Jie and XStream have found a way to
manoeuvre a film with such a dark and complex vision through the official
censorship process. Perhaps the playful quasi-fantasy trappings worked to
divert the Film Bureau's attention its dark and disquieting heart.

Xu Haofeng's new swordplay drama THE SWORD IDENTITY (Wokou de zongji) is
quite sui generis. At the risk of sounding a bit pretentious, I'd even be
tempted to call it a meta-film, a clever, playful, critical gloss on the
wuxia genre (swordplay / chivalric martial arts). Xu himself has even
described it to me as a fanwuxiapian, an anti-wuxia film. Xu comes to
directing with interesting experience: he is himself a student of wushu;
his teacher is from a long line of traditionally important wushu masters.
He is also a Beijing Film Academy professor and a wuxia novelist. And he
is one of the screenwriters of Wong Kar-wai's long-in-production martial
arts feature on Bruce Lee's teacher, The Grandmasters (Yidai zongshi)

Both an homage to and an elegant, comic deconstruction of the classic
Chinese and Japanese martial arts cinema traditions, The Sword Identity
certainly has that genre's typically convoluted plot. During the Ming
dynasty somewhere in southern China, Liang Henyu and a colleague, sneaking
into town, are mistaken for Japanese pirates by government soldiers.
Handsome, dashing Liang is in fact a disciple of anti-Japanese fighters,
who had used specially modified Japanese long swords to defeat said
pirates. Seeking to establish his sword technique as a recognized martial
art, Liang stages a series of mysterious combats with the town's four
official martial arts sects who (arbitrary rules being a mainstay of the
genre) will only admit his school if he can defeat each of them in turn.
Thrown into the mix are a comic chorus of red-clad Xinjiang maidens, the
estranged wife of a great master swordsman (along her own young
not-so-secret lover), and a bumbling quintet of hapless soldiers.
The core of the film's precisely choreographed non-action has Liang
teaching his two new female disciples (one of the Xinjiang maidens and the
estranged wife) to use a rather lovely minimalist, meditative technique to
defeat each challenging swordsman with one stroke of a simple long stick.

Xu uses sound as much as montage and actual physical action to create a
sensation of movement and combat. His action incorporates stillness,
grace, and a particular static energy, a crackling, frozen tension that
I've not seen before. One inspiration is King Hu's aesthetic of the
glimpse, the ultra-quick cut; another is the gestures of classic Japanese
cinema's flash-cut instantaneous action sequences.  The film's final
master vs swordsman showdown is refined to a pure philosophy of swordplay,
where age faces youth and non-action triumphs over action.

TIFF stepped outside of its slate of Film Bureau-approved selections with
the late (and rather low-profile) addition of PEOPLE MOUNTAIN PEOPLE SEA
(Ren shan ren hai) to its lineup (Venice treated the film with similar
mystery, only announcing it near the end of the festival as its "surprise
film" of the competition). Cai Shangjun and his producers did in fact
intend to make a film that could pass censorship, but so far haven't found
a way to secure a Longbiao (the "Dragon Seal", the Film Bureau's official
seal of approval that must be affixed to the beginning of every film
showing in theatres in China). And it's not clear how they could, given
the darkness and violence that is fundamental to this film's story and
vision.

Lao Tie (played by theatre actor Chen Bingjian with the smoldering
intensity of a slow-burning fuse) is a minor quarry boss beset with debt
in dirt poor Guizhou province. One day his brother, a motorcycle courier,
is murdered by a passenger. The police quickly identify the murderer,
named Xiao Qiang, but can't find him. Lao Tie decides that his mission is
to revenge the murder of his brother. He camps out at Xiao Qiang's house,
living (apparently amicably) with Xiao Qiang's mother and child for a few
days. When Xiao Qiang doesn't appear, Lao Tie goes out on the road. The
film then transforms into something like a purified road movie, moving
through Chongqing (where Xiao Qiang has connections), the countryside of
Sichuan, Inner Mongolia, and finally back to Guizhou.

Lao Tie rarely speaks; he becomes a physical incorporation of two
abstractions: a desire for personal vengeance, and a force that must keep
in motion in order to exist. Along the way, the film shows him seemingly
casually raping his ex girlfriend, abandoning (for the second time) his
young son, beating up a corrupt cop, and tangling with a desperate drug
dealer (it's hard to imagine any of this surviving a Film
Bureau-sanctioned cut). The final substantial section of the film takes
place in near darkness, in a coal mine, where Lao Tie finally finds Xiao
Qiang. But when personal vengeance is thwarted, his actions become
quasi-apocalyptic.

I wish I knew what all this means. Part of the problem is Cai's management
of narrative: he wants to be elliptical, which is fine. But the
combination of darkness, lack of dialogue, and near-invisibility of faces
in the mining section of the film leaves most viewers in the dark about
the crucially important events that occur there. The sophisticated craft
deployed by Cai Shangjun, his d.p. Dong Jingsong, and designers Zhai Tao
and Jin Yang are undeniably impressive. Shots are carefully designed for
maximum depth and impact, with a largely still camera watching
panoramically from a distance, in Cinemascope ratio. There is an
existential weight (for lack of a better term) to each shot, signaling a
heavy burden of meaning, an utter seriousness of purpose. The film seems
to move from a kind of bleak Beckettian ontological engagement with
absurdity through an implicit, ferocious critique of Chinese masculinity,
to a evocation of Hieronymus Bosch-like glimpses of hell on earth. Hum
anity seems fragile, unmoored, desperate for a reason for being. A
masculine wielding of violence fills this need (wielding violence against
women, against animals, against children); a need which is finally
subsumed into a pure exterminationist fantasy. I can't think of a bleaker
vision of contemporary life in any recent Chinese film. If Cai Shangjun
had been able to  wrestle his fragmented, fractured visionary ferocity
into something more articulate, had he been able to design a logical
structure that invited audiences to do something more than sit back and
stare, with horror, at the nightmares he presents, then he would have had
the makings here of a great film. As it is, though, People Mountain People
Sea is singularly riveting.

[to be continued]