MCLC: TIFF 2011, China cinema rising, 2

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Shelly Kraicer <shellyk at mac.com>
Subject: TIFF 2011, China cinema rising, 2
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[cross-posted from Chinese Cinema Digest]

In addition to the films discussed in Part 1 of this report from the
People's Republic, the Toronto International FIlm Festival  presented one
film from Taiwan in 2011. This was the international version of Wei
Te-sheng's blockbuster SEEDIQ BALE, re-titled WARRIORS OF THE RAINBOW:
SEEDIQ BALE. This was a preliminary short version, prepared for the Venice
Film Festival world premiere, of Wei's 4 1/2 hour-long original. A new
international version is to replace this Venice/TIFF cut (I prefer the
original Taiwan release version, which was fortunately the version made
available to us at the Vancouver International Film Festival by the
international distributor Fortissimo and Wei's production company ARS Film
Production).

I offer here some preliminary thoughts on the film: it is a major event in
Taiwanese cinema, and I'll need to do more research before I can offer
anything more than these provisional observations. After Wei's
surprisingly and hugely successful first film Cape No. 7 (Haijiao qihao,
2008), he had the chutzpah and the finances to embark on his dream
project: an epic history of the 1930 revolt by the Seediq, a Taiwanese
aboriginal tribe, against their Japanese colonial masters. First, a bit of
background: Wei Te-sheng based his Taiwanese aboriginal epic on a
Taiwanese graphic novel that described an extraordinary though little
known historical event: the Wushe incident of 1930. During the fifty-year
long Japanese occupation of Taiwan, the remnants of the aboriginal tribes
who first settled the island lived in the central Taiwanese mountains. The
Japanese colonial government restricted these tribes from practicing their
traditional head hunting and facial tattooing, and deprived t hem of their
lands and weapons. An uneasy peace came to a head in 1930, when tribal
leader Mouna Rudo, a "hero of the tribe", or "Seediq Bale" organized six
villages of the Seediq tribe to attack the Japanese occupation police on
October 27 in Wushe village. Their carefully planned and executed
rebellion resulted in the killing of 136 Japanese men and women. The
rebellion lasted for fifty days, as Japan sent police and army
reinforcements to crush the aboriginal fighters. Eventually, the Japanese
resorted to dropping poison gas on the rebels from aircraft. The rebellion
took on an epic -- and desperate -- aspect of a 20th century Trojan siege.
Seediq heroes fought to the death, while their family members were
instructed to commit suicide in order to escape capture and humiliation.

Wei Te-sheng's original version of the film is split into two parts: the
first sets the scene, outlining complicated internecine tribal rivalries,
the arrival of the Japanese, social conditions of the occupation, the
organization of the rebellion, and the Wushe incident itself. This section
takes time to delineate a complex set of characters and the full range of
their responses to Japanese occupation: from indifference to commercial
cooperation (here we see the film's few glimpses of Han Chinese) to
strained collaboration and cultural co-optation. The two most fascinating
"middle" characters in the film are Seediqs who have become Japanese
government policemen: they have assimilated into Japanese culture and
still retain their own sense of aboriginal identity. The Seediq themselves
retreat up the mountains, sink into alcoholism, and bridle under harsh
Japanese rule. The Japanese themselves in the film have a range of
colonial identities, from harsh racists through ambivalent
educators to respectful observers of Seediq culture. Some of the Seediq
become resigned to defeated subservience and survival, others, like the
film's hero Mouna Rudo, quietly organize rebellion, while hot headed
younger warriors want immediate action. Wei Te-sheng has ample resources
at his disposal to assemble and mobilize all these different elements; and
his even larger ambition is to depict the complexity, the moral ambiguity,
and the impossibly difficult life or death choices that these communities
have to make when facing threats of violence and annihilation.

There are clear weaknesses in the film: the characterizations are often
flat; dialogue can sink, for large stretches of time, to mere expository
recitations or repeated, stentorian heroic declarations. The unfortunately
trite musical score unnecessarily italicizes (and thereby flattens) the
rich emotional underpinnings of the story. The film relies on a certain
amount of CGI to create its lush forest and mountain settings, and the
effects are frequently, obviously inadequate. The mise-en-scène too often
sports a kind of manga aesthetic (betraying its origins in Wei's memories
of the original comic book, perhaps?) that results in brash, unsubtle
compositions forcing a flat, pumped up "heroic" aesthetic on material that
needs more varied visual treatment. This is also largely a men's film:
Seediq and Japanese women are relegated to background, stereotypical
roles, as largely passive observers.

But despite these flaws, the film has a visceral power, a plastic and
supple rhythm that supplies substantial forward momentum (the 41Ž2 hour
version, that is: the TIFF version doesn't, and its 2.5 hours therefore
feels paradoxically longer than the full version) and a confidence in its
ability to tell complicated, multi-centred narratives. This is most
evident in Wei's great set piece, the Wushe attack itself, which comes at
the end of the first section. The second section is another film entirely:
it absolutely unflinchingly, with real courage, delves into the darkest
realms of war crimes, terrorism, mass suicide, cultural annihilation, and
genocide. And gives its audience no quarter: we are forced to confront
actions of the "heroes" -- with whom we have learned passionately to
identify with -- that, in other, more "normal" contexts, might seem
horrifyingly cultlike, sadistic, brutal. If Seediq Bale's second section
had been shaped with the clear logic and focus of the first,
it would have even more power. It is episodic, though, and amounts to a
relentless accumulation of details of horribly violent acts (the structure
is something like a theme and variations, though without any sense of
forward movement). This piling up of horror after horror can be more
wearying than morally and emotionally engaging for an audience. We are
somewhere on the boundary between conceptual idea-based cinema and
narrative cinema, and I'm not sure that Wei and his team have made the
structural choices necessary to transform this section from the former to
the latter. But Wei's deeper meaning is clear: in the most extreme
situations, in which the spiritual life of a community, the survival of an
entire society is being brutally extinguished, the normal categories of
morality totter and sometimes collapse. Confronting a choice between
either life without meaning or non-existence, what must a community do?
This is a question that has, unsurprisingly, hit a nerve with Taiwanese
audiences, who have flocked in huge numbers to see a film that may
subconsciously address, in certain oblique ways, their own underlying
existential anxieties.

>From epic history to intimate family stories: from Hong Kong, TIFF
presented Ann Hui's new film A SIMPLE LIFE (Tao jie). After an elderly
maid for a Hong Kong film producer has a stroke, he finds a nursing home
for her to move into. With that simple premise, based on the real life
story of producer Roger Lee and his actual family's amah Chung Chun-tao
(aka Ah Tao), Hui has crafted one of her greatest films. This low-key
masterpiece of almost documentary realism features big stars and
non-professionals: king of Hong Kong cinema Andy Lau plays Roger and the
remarkable actress Deannie Yip plays Ah Tao; elderly nursing home
residents play themselves.

Quiet, polite, almost self-effacing Roger (he's at one point mistaken for
an air conditioner repairman) negotiates film budgets for a living. At
home, he's aided by his family's long time maid, or amah, Ah Tao, who's
been with his family for four generations, over 60 years. She's a tough
bargainer in her own right, buying just the right ox tongue in the market
for Roger's favourite stew. But when she collapses from a stroke, she's
the one who needs to be cared for. Following her wishes, Roger finds a
nursing home for her to live in. She gradually integrates into this new
society of strong-willed seniors, as her physical health continues to
decline.

Deannie Yip, winner of two Hong Kong Film Awards over twenty years ago, is
remarkable as Ah Tao, embodying a quiet but vibrantly alive woman whose
spirit, once sharp, now flickers with age (her performance won Venice's
best actress award, where the film premiered). Andy Lau's performance
gives her perfect support: reserved, subtle, self-effacingly warm. In one
exemplary scene, Lau is standing just behind Yip: the focus is on her, as
it should be, but Hui's camera catches, in the slightest change of Lau's
facial expression, a flicker of Roger's affectionate nostalgia that
revives the whole of his past emotional life with A Tao, shaded with his
knowledge that it will soon be lost.

If one was looking for something to criticize in the film, and one would
have to look pretty hard, then a comparison with Hui's The Way We Are
(Tianshuiwei de ri yu ye, 2008) may be instructive. That earlier film
finds a kind of perfection in its minimalism, its honest adherence to a
realist aesthetic, its eschewal of star performance, and its absolute
horror of any kind of dramatized, let alone sentimentalized dramaturgy. A
Simple Life does not strive for that kind of purity. It does acknowledge,
playfully, the "starness" of the stars who inhabit it. It keeps a certain
distance from dramatization and sentimentality, but doesn't absolutely
abjure them. Traces of dramatized sentiment remain, placing the film
inside the wenyi tradition while keeping it largely free from the kind of
"melodrama" that has negative connotations in western dramatic aesthetics.
Hui does make certain, limited concessions to the kind of dramatization
that practical movie-making in Hong Kong now demands
, especially movie-making with this level of star power. But her judgement
is astute, her compromises are strictly limited. Her film speaks with a
liberated assurance, a quiet beauty, in a confidently mature, modestly
self-effacing voice that is recognizably a woman's but that speaks
directly to our innermost feelings.

There were just six new Chinese films at TIFF this year (one of which, Lou
Ye's, is in fact French), two from Hong Kong, and one from Taiwan (two of
these are not reviewed here). All but one of the mainland films are
officially approved. Noteworthy absences from TIFF's list were any sort of
independent Chinese documentary, which is striking given the prominence
and international success of these kinds of Chinese films in international
festivals over the past few years.

The day before TIFF officially opened, TIFF and the Chinese Consulate in
Toronto jointly held a press conference at TIFF's shiny new Bell Lightbox
headquarters. TIFF's authorized mainland films (plus a post-festival
screening of Jackie Chan's propaganda film 1911) were highlighted, among
the usual friendly diplomatic talk of increased cooperation. How closely
will TIFF's new embrace of Chinese feature films map onto the subset of
films that the Chinese government itself approves? It will be interesting
to watch TIFF's programming in future editions of the festival. One
doesn't have to underline the dangers, as well as the opportunities here
for TIFF. Certainly, the past two years' exponential increase in Chinese
commercial film production is a phenomenon of international importance,
and one that TIFF is compelled to acknowledge in its programming. Chinese
films will enter the global cinema marketplace, which is something that
worldwide film buyers and sellers have resisted up
until now (other than certain narrowly defined genre films, martial arts
and wuxia, plus a smattering of non-action historical costume dramas and a
very few marketable "name brand" directors like Zhang Yimou). China's
government is pushing its "soft power" as a way to gain international
prestige and cultural influence. This "soft power" policy rests on the
promotion of Chinese language (via its expanding worldwide network of
Confucius Institutes) and Chinese culture, a key vector of which will be
Chinese commercial cinema, if the markets of the world can be induced to
open their gates. TIFF could be a key player this policy, as one of the
most influential venues (along with the Cannes Film Festival and Market)
through which films enter the international marketplace.