San Diego Asian Film Festival 2014 Review: Lou Ye's "Blind Massage"

Blind Massage (Tui na). 2014. Directed by Lou Ye. Produced by Wang Yong. Written by Ma Yingli, based on the novel "Tui na" by Bi Feiyu. Cinematography by Zeng Jian. Edited by Kong Jinlei and Zhu Lin. Music by Johann Johannsson. Production design by Du Ailin. Costume design by Zhang Dingmu. Sound by Fu Kang.

Cast: Qin Hao, Guo Xiaodong, Huang Xuan, Zhang Lei, Mei Ting, Huang Lu, Jiang Dan, Huang Junjun, Mu Huaipeng, Wang Zhihua, Wang Lu.

(Note: this review was originally posted on Twitch.)

Often controversial Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye delivers one of his finest films with Blind Massage, a delicately observed and artfully directed ensemble drama, based on the novel of the same name by Bi Feiyu. Putting aside, at least for the time being, the intensely sexualized scenarios that marked some of his previous films (Summer Palace, Spring Fever, Love and Bruises, Mystery), Lou immerses us in a unique world - that of the blind - that's never been captured on film in quite this way. Sighted professional actors playing blind, including some Lou regulars, mesh seamlessly with actual non-sighted and partially-sighted amateurs to create a broad canvas encompassing several stories that are all engrossing and beautifully rendered.

Blind Massage begins with an offscreen narrator (who is heard intermittently throughout the film) telling the story of Xiao Ma (Huang Xuan) who lost his sight in a car accident that killed his mother. After he learns that his blindness is permanent and not a temporary condition as he'd been led to believe, he attempts suicide by cutting his own throat. After being saved, he is taught Braille and later joins the Sha Zongqi Massage Center in Nanjing, where blind and partially sighted masseurs and masseuses service customers and are provided with a home and livelihood. This is also where most of the action in the film takes place, in this bustling, crowded environment where joys, pain, and passions play themselves out in a way that is quite mesmerizing to behold.

After the opening credits - which, appropriately in a film about the blind, are read aloud rather than printed onscreen - we are introduced to the other workers and residents of the center. As the narrator tells us, the film initially takes place in the "golden age of blind massage." The center is run by two men with opposite personalities: the garrulous, self-styled ladies man Sha Fuming (Qin Hao) and the more subdued and serious Zhang Zongqi (Wang Zhihua). Sha's old classmate Wang (Guo Xiaodong), fleeing Shenzhen with his tail between his legs after losing his shirt on bad stocks, asks Fuming for a job, since Wang is also a trained masseur.

Wang brings along his fiancé, the partially sighted Kong (Zhang Lei), a sassy and flirtatious young woman who very quickly becomes Xiao Ma's object of erotic obsession. Sensing Xiao Ma's frustration over his unrequited desire, his friend Zhang Yiguang (Mu Huaipeng) takes him to Nanjing's red-light district, and to a very different kind of massage parlor, where Xiao Ma meets Mann (Huang Lu), a beautiful young prostitute; they soon forge a much closer relationship than the normal hooker-client one. However, Xiao Ma still can't let go of his feelings for Kong.

Meanwhile, Fuming falls head over heels for a new masseuse, Du Hong (Mei Ting); she fends off his advances, and generally finds the other male workers' obsession with her beauty to be a burden. Also, Wang has to defend his younger brother from some scary loan sharks; he backs them off by performing a startlingly violent and rather gory bit of self-sacrifice.

Lou Ye and screenwriter Ma Yingli weave all these stories together with sensitivity, compassion, and an elegant artistry that is often stunning. In a presumably similar way to Bi Feiyu's source material, these blind characters are not held up as objects of pity nor are their stories presented as vehicles for cheaply inspirational uplift. Instead, they appear to us as full human beings, with the same joys, laughter, pains, suffering, and sexual desires as so-called "normal" people. They're not over-romanticized, either; some of them are seen committing some rather negative and unsavory acts. At the same time, the dignity with which they practice their craft and carry themselves is quite remarkable; one of the films' best scenes has the blind workers leading sighted visitors safely out of the building during a blackout.

Blind Massage also finds a wonderful way to approximate for sighted viewers the experience of blindness; vertiginous close-ups, blurry and impressionistic visual textures, and odd angles form a great deal of the visual schema of the film. This is a great testament to the talents of cinematographer Zeng Jian, who won a Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution at this year's Berlin Film Festival for his work. Also contributing greatly to the evocative mood is Icelandic composer Johann Johannson - who also scored Lou Ye's previous film Mystery - who provides a spare, minimalist score that beautifully undergirds the rich landscape of human emotions that Ye and his collaborators have so vividly created.

Blind Massage screens on November 8, 3:45pm as part of the San Diego Asian Film Festival. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit the festival's website.

The Bourne Cinema Filmography: Zhang Yimou, "Red Sorghum" (1987)

Red Sorghum (Hong gao liang). 1987. Directed by Zhang Yimou. Written by Chen Jianyu, Zhu Wei, and Mo Yan, based on the novel "Red Sorghum Clan" by Mo Yan. Produced by Wu Tian-ming. Cinematography by Gu Changwei. Music by Zhao Jiping. Art direction by Yang Gang.

Cast: Gong Li (Jiu'er), Jiang Wen (Yu), Liu Ji (Father), Teng Ru-jun (Luohan), Ji Cun-hua (Sanpao).


Adapted from a section of Red Sorghum Clan, a multi-volume novel by Mo Yan, this year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature, Zhang Yimou’s 1987 film Red Sorghum put the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers solidly on the world cinema map. (Remarkably, this was a fast book-to-film adaptation; both the novel and the film version were released in the same year.) Winning the Golden Bear at the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival, Red Sorghum was an auspicious debut for both cinematographer-turned-director Zhang and its young lead actress Gong Li. Zhang would go on to make more accomplished films, and Gong would grow more into the luminous beauty she is today, but Red Sorghum shows that they were beginning from an already elevated level.

Red Sorghum is set in the 1920s and 1930s in Shandong, a northeastern province of China. This is immediately set up as a memory piece, through the voiceover of a man who tells us that what we are seeing will show how his grandparents met and how his father was conceived. The unnamed and unseen narrator’s grandmother is Jiu’er (Gong Li), or “Nine,” whom we first see getting ready to be taken by a palanquin to her new husband, a leprous older wine merchant named Li Datou. This is an arranged marriage set up by her parents, and one she is an unwilling participant in. As the title indicates, red is an important and dominant color in the film, and this is the color of the interior of the sedan, as well as the color of the veil placed over Jiu’er’s head during the trip.

The narrator tells us that his grandfather is Yu (Jiang Wen), one of the men hired to carry Jiu’er to her husband. In a sequence that introduces the earthy bawdiness of this tale, Yu leads the rest of the muscular, shirtless men in a song that attempts to get a rise out of the impassive Jiu’er, as they tease her about her marriage, and jostle the car violently about as they sing. Jiu’er’s sobs and impending motion sickness eventually get them to stop. The travelers are soon waylaid by a bandit who tries to rob them and rape Jiu’er. Jiu’er, who has been exchanging surreptitious glances at Yu through the whole trip, throws bold glances at him as she is ordered out of the car by the bandit, wordlessly challenging him to save her. Yu rises to the occasion, overpowering the bandit with the help of the other men. Later in the film, after Jiu’er has been living at the winery for some time, Yu, wearing a bandit’s mask, abducts Jiu’er on her way home from a visit to her parents, and in a scene with intimations of rape (although Jiu’er doesn’t seem to be unwilling), he proceeds to have sex with her in a Sorghum field. This, the narrator tells us, is where his father was conceived.

Jiu’er, despite being forced into marriage, and twice carried by men in their arms like a potato sack, is no mere passive victim. She is a headstrong, argumentative woman, who at one point condemns her father for essentially selling her to an older man in exchange for a new mule. After Li Datong is murdered offscreen under mysterious circumstances (the narrator suspects his grandfather, though we never learn who did it), Jiu’er takes over the winery, and in contrast to their previous dictatorial owner, runs it as a collective with the workers as equal partners with her. This puts Red Sorghum solidly on good footing with Communist ideology, as the proletariat defeats evil capitalism, at least for a time. Yu drunkenly returns to proclaim himself Jiu’er’s new husband; though she throws him out at first, he is later able to claim his prize, after peeing in the vats of wine, which (in an example of the film’s bawdy and absurd humor) improves the flavor of the wine, and contributes to the great success of the winery.

Red Sorghum takes a dramatic shift from the humorous, almost fairy-tale quality of the earlier sections, to a much more violent and tragic tone, as the Japanese invade China, destroying the winery in the process. This shift is abrupt and awkwardly handled, highlighting the narrative weaknesses of the film. The Japanese are portrayed as violent and sadistic oppressors, punishing men by having them hanged and skinned alive like animals, and forcing the Chinese to do this to their own. Jiu’er and Yu lead an attempt to fight back against the Japanese, which sets the stage for the tragic ending to the film.

Red Sorghum has been justly celebrated for its visual quality; Zhang’s experience as a cinematographer makes sure that the film is no less than ravishing in its sensual use of color. For this film, Zhang employed Gu Changwei, another talented cinematographer who went on to become a remarkable director himself. The natural beauty of the landscape, the nearly documentary-like details of the wine production, and the full use of the symbolism of the color red – blood, the Japanese flag, the final red-drenched closing scenes – all of this makes Red Sorghum a veritable feast for the eyes.

The performances in the film are just as riveting as the visuals. Gong Li, though she would make a greater impression in later films by Zhang and others, is already in full command of the screen, a master of the portentous glance and sensual expression. Her ecstatic expression as she is seduced by Yu is one of the film’s most memorable shots. Jiang Wen as Yu wonderfully conveys the brutal animal-like nature of his character, although he is not portrayed as an evil person, and indeed displays heroic qualities throughout the film.

Red Sorghum screens at Asia Society, on 35 millimeter, on December 2, 4pm as part of the impressive film series “Goddess: Chinese Women on Screen,” which runs through December 8. For more information, visit Asia Society’s website.

Tribeca Film Festival 2012 Review: Stephen Maing's "High Tech, Low Life"

High Tech, Low Life. 2012. Directed and photographed by Stephen Maing. Produced by Stephen Maing and Trina Rodriguez. Edited by Stephen Maing and Jonathan Oppenheim. Music by Brendon Anderegg, Brad Hyland, and Kevin Micka.

(Note: this review has been cross-posted on VCinema.)

Stephen Maing’s timely and fascinating documentary High Tech, Low Life, examines the subject of journalism and internet censorship in China through the eyes and experiences of two very different citizen journalists.  Both are people from humble backgrounds who found a new calling using the power of blogging and the internet to uncover stories hidden from the public by the government and to give other people like themselves (often in worse circumstances) a voice and an outlet for their grievances that they have been denied in official channels.  High Tech, Low Life has its world premiere at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

27-year-old Zhou Shuguang, known by the blogger handle “Zola,” before embarking on his new internet life, was a vegetable seller from Fengmuqiao, Hunan Province.  “I used to be a nobody before I discovered the internet,” he says by way of introduction.  After deciding on impulse to investigate the forced eviction of citizens of a neighboring province by city developers, and posting what he found on his blog, the overwhelming response and the measure of fame he received encouraged him to pursue citizen journalism full time.  The next major case we see him reporting on is the rape and murder of a young girl by a high official’s relative, and the apparent subsequent cover-up of this crime.  This episode is illuminating not only for its demonstration of Zola’s tenacious efforts to expose the government’s complicity in protecting well-connected criminals, but also the potentially negative aspects of Zola’s attention-seeking personality.  Zola gets his information by disavowing any sort of journalistic identity, posing as simply a curious onlooker and blogger.  He attends the dead girl’s public wake, and rather ill-advisedly snaps a photo of himself smiling by the girl’s coffin, drawing an outraged comment on his blog condemning his lack of respect for the dead.  Certainly, there is an egocentric aspect to Zola’s activities: he often wears a T-shirt emblazoned with his own image, and at one point he takes a picture of himself that makes it look as if he is leaping over the Great Wall of China, which he makes into a large poster that he displays at a Chinese blogger conference.  However, he consciously sees himself as a representative of the youth of China, with their distracted, short attention spans, and his brash, outsized antics seem designed to appeal to them.  And of course, it’s not only about fame, since there are far safer and less controversial ways of achieving fame than flouting censorship; he is no activist, but he tirelessly strives to bring to light practices of corruption and exploitation in his society that are kept from the public.

57-year-old Zhang Shihe, known as “Tiger Temple,” lives in Beijing, and has a much more low-key personality than the younger Zola.  Similarly to Zola, he got into citizen journalism pretty much by accident: he witnessed a brutal murder being committed in public and posted stills on his blog.  It was eventually taken down, but not before being circulated widely by others on the internet.  Tiger Temple finds the outlet for literary expression and his wish to help others less fortunate that had heretofore eluded him, regularly traveling on his bike to the countryside and reporting on farmers who have been neglected and ill-treated by government authorities.  He interviews and reports on people who have had their land used as dumping grounds for toxic industrial and human wastes, and on those who have suffered the broken promises of government to assist them during changing agrarian policies.  Tiger Temple’s age and personal background provide a sense of history and cultural context that forms a counterpoint to Zola’s relative inexperience.  Tiger Temple’s family suffered from persecution during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which his family lost everything and he became homeless; thereafter Tiger Temple embarked on the itinerant lifestyle that he practices today.  Tiger Temple, also in contrast to Zola, sees his brand of journalism as activism and advocacy for the people he reports on.  He arranges for legal representation for the farmers, and he also tries to help the homeless in Beijing around Tiananmen Square find housing after the city destroys their makeshift shelters. 

The film alternates between Zola and Tiger Temple’s separate trajectories, until the two finally meet at a Chinese blogger’s conference.  During their meeting, Tiger Temple sizes up Zola immediately: he calls him a “playful warrior,” a great phrase that perfectly describes Zola’s approach to his journalistic activities.  Zola is also quite self-aware of his own generation: “We’re selfish,” he says of himself and others of his age; he sees this attitude as the first step in “breaking out of the Communist mindset.”

Zola and Tiger Temple are far from fire-breathing radicals, but their activities in reporting uncensored news nevertheless puts them squarely on the government authorities’ radar.  Even though both are careful not to call themselves “journalists” to avoid government regulation and censorship, this doesn’t prevent them from regularly being followed during their travels and having their plans thwarted.  Zola is refused permission to leave the country to attend a blogger’s conference in Germany, and Tiger Temple is detained in the middle of the night and forced to leave Beijing during a national conference.  Their efforts to evade the “Great Firewall,” China’s massive internet censorship mechanism, by providing information unfiltered by the state, cause them to be regarded as threats to national security.  The heat on them only increases during such sensitive times as the Beijing Olympics and the state uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, the so-called “Arab Spring.”

As indicated in title High Tech, Low Life, Stephen Maing gives us a thorough sense of how the latest technological tools can be used to illuminate the lives of those who live far from the places where such tools are commonly available.  In China’s case, many of these people are those who have been left behind, and often trampled under, in the wake of the country’s rapid economic progress.  High Tech, Low Life travels from Beijing to the remote countryside, binding the experiences of the two contrasting blogger personalities who are its subjects with evocative visuals that vividly illustrate the social context that surrounds these two men and their search for the truth.

New York Asian Film Festival 2010 Review: Ye Daying's "Tian An Men"

Tian An Men. 2009. Directed by Ye Daying. Written by Wang Bing. Produced by Han Sanping. Cinematography by Yang Tao. Edited by Cheng Long. Music by Xu Xiangrong. Production design by Quan Rongzhe. Visual effects supervised by Feng Liwei. Sound by Gu Changning.

Cast: Pan Yueming, Liu Xiaoxin, Tian Lihe, Xin Peng, Guo Keyu, Masanobu Otsuka.

(Note: this review has also been cross-posted on Twitch.)

Aliens, ninjas, mutant girls, soft porn, ass-kicking martial arts, unclassifiable weirdness … the New York Asian Film Festival truly has something for everyone, and these elements are perennials of this festival that is now in its ninth year. Such creatures and film genres, in fact, should by now be expected sights at the NYAFF. However, one of the true oddities of this year’s selections is Ye Daying’s Tian An Men, a slightly modernized slice of straight-up PRC propaganda created for last year’s 60th anniversary of the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic of China. Tian An Men is very much a throwback to the Chinese state productions of the 1950s and 1960s which glorified China with heroic episodes from the country’s history. The most famous cinematic product of last year’s celebration/nostalgia trip in China was Huang Jianxin and Han Sanping’s The Founding of a Republic, a star-studded super-production that detailed the history leading up to the formation of Communist China. The cast was a veritable who’s-who of just about every significant star of mainland China and Hong Kong. Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi, Andy Lau, and Zhao Wei are but a few of the superstars who appeared in this film, mostly glimpsed in the briefest of blink-and-you-missed-them cameos. Alas, despite its blinding star-wattage, The Founding of a Republic was a tedious exercise in mind-numbing exposition, so obsessed with trivial detail and blindly reverential that it was practically unwatchable. Still, the film did extremely well, breaking box-office records, probably more because of the patriotism of its audience rather than any real enthusiasm about its quality.


Tian An Men is easily far superior to The Founding of a Republic, if only because it dramatizes one specific episode rather than being a vast but shallow panoramic historical portrait. The film concerns a group of People’s Liberation Army soldiers tasked with getting Tiananmen Square in proper shape for Chairman Mao Zedong to give his speech at the founding ceremony of the People’s Republic of China on Oct. 1, 1949. Tian An Men delves into the rather fascinating minutiae of the problems the PLA faced in accomplishing their mission in the scant month in which they had to do it. The most dramatic episodes concern the acquisition of red dye for banners, and the quest to find proper sized lanterns to adorn the stage where Mao will speak. This scenario, on paper, threatens to be unbearably boring, but Tian An Men avoids this potential pitfall due to its detailed specificity, handsome production design (with CGI post-production enhancement), solid if unspectacular performances, and its utterly straight-faced sincerity. Tiananmen Square, of course, is associated in most people’s minds today with a far more tragic period of Chinese history, but the film that bears its name mostly succeeds in making this reality not an insurmountable impediment to appreciating this film.

Tian An Men screens on July 8, 1:45pm at the Walter Reade Theater. Click here to purchase tickets.

Watch the Tian An Men trailer here.

A Drifting Life

Betelnut (Bing Lang). 2005. Written, directed and photographed by Yang Heng. Produced by Liu Jinhou, Yang Heng, Tian Xiaopo and Wang Hongwei. Edited by Tian Kun. Music by Wu Jun. Location sound by Shen Jin Guang. Sound production by He Bin. 

Cast: Tian Li, Liang Yu, Wu Ming, Dai Qi, Xiong Heqing, Zhu Ju, Gao Yi, Tian Linfeng, Duan Zhoujin, Ji Jiaxing, Xiang Peng, Fan Chao, Duan Zhouqian, Luo Xiadong, Wang Shengcong, Long Zeli, Quan Limin, Liang Xiaolong, Xiong Hui.

"Life seems so cheap sometimes." This statement by a girl succinctly expresses the philosophy of the aimless characters of Yang Heng's debut feature Betelnut, a quietly stunning film that finds great beauty in its stillness and austerity, rendering the actions of its characters within a rich musique concrete-like sound design and an intricately arranged visual field that makes us pay attention to the tiniest detail of its images. Yang often has major events of the film occur in extreme long-shot, obscured behind objects, or otherwise somewhere other than in the foreground. This serves to paint a compelling portrait of the restless youths in the film, who while away a hot, lazy summer by drifting on boats, voice chatting and playing video games at internet cafes, smoking, chewing betelnut, and having the occasional drunken binge in a karaoke bar. This all occurs in the ultimate dead-end town: there seem to be few opportunities or job prospects, no school, adults, or controlling authority, and the boys indulge in petty crime and thuggery. One of the characters manages to escape this place at the conclusion (although it's hard to say for how long), while the others remain trapped in this endless, nothing existence.

Set in Jishou, Hunan province (Yang's birthplace), Betelnut focuses on two young boys, Ali and Xiao Yu, who while away the days hanging out by the river and drifting on the boat where one of them live. They steal motorbikes and sell them to make money, which they use to hang out in internet cafes and drink at karaoke clubs. They are consciously take-no-shit tough guys, but they have major weak spots that manifest themselves, and in some sense are exploited by, the two girls they pursue romantic relationships with. One of the boys encounters a girl in an internet cafe, chatting with another boy online. He runs into her again after he meets her again at the gas station where she works. His friend pursues a girl who happens to already have a boyfriend. But romantic attachments here are just as ephemeral and tenuous as the other parts of their lives. Just as the boys assert their freedom to take what they want and beat down anyone else who gets in their way, the girls assert their freedom not to be attached to anyone, and to be free to be with anyone they wish at any time. This, naturally, creates some violent conflicts in the course of the film.

This is very familiar material, and fairly standard in films dealing with young people. The difference is in the bold and radical style Yang imparts to the material. The long-take aesthetic is a common mode of Asian art cinema; Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang are two of its better known adherents. Yang, however, takes this even further than other filmmakers, allowing the sense of oppressive stillness and heat of the environment to permeate our consciousness in a visceral fashion. Yang's approach to landscape composition has been compared to Chinese classical painting, and this pastoral serenity, combined with Yang's mostly fixed camera, proves to be a sharp contrast with the dramatic events that occur within this scenery. This effect is aided greatly by the superb sound design, which fills in significant narrative details and makes the film an even more vivid experience. Yang proves himself a major talent with Betelnut, a film which greatly rewards patience and observation. Yang's subsequent feature Sun Spots pushes this style even further, and there he comes up with even more lovely and mesmerizing results.

Betelnut screens tomorrow at 6:45 at Asia Society, as part of its series "China's Past, Present and Future on Film," highlighting recent independent Chinese films. Click here to purchase tickets. Use the discount code "asia725" to buy tickets at the $7 member rate.

The Bourne Cinema Filmography: Jia Zhang-ke, "24 City" (2008)

24 City (Er shi si cheng ji). 2008. Directed by Jia Zhang-ke. Written by Jia Zhang-ke and Zhai Yongming. Produced by Jia Zhang-ke, Shozo Ichiyama, and Wang Hong. Cinematography by Yu Lik-wai and Wang Yu. Edited by Lin Xudong, Kong Jinlai, and Li Haiyang. Music by Yoshihiro Hanno and Lim Giong. Art direction by Liu Qiang and Chen Rongchao. Sound design by Zhang Yang. Costume design by Zhao Tong.

Cast: Joan Chen (Gu Minhua), Lu Liping (Hao Dali), Zhao Tao (Su Na), Chen Jianbin (Zhao Gang).

Jia Zhang-ke's magisterial, mesmerizing documentary/fiction hybrid, 24 City, opens today in New York at the IFC Center. Surely one of the best films of the year, it's scheduled to play for just a week, so get thee to the theater immediately. The proximity of this film's release to the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising may or may not be coincidental, but the occasion certainly provides much food for thought on the massive changes that have occurred in China since then. (For a great assessment of the ongoing legacy of the Tiananmen Square protests, check out this post on Edwin Mak's blog.)

Below is a (slightly modified) review of 24 City that I wrote when it screened at last year's New York Film Festival:

Perhaps the most famous of cinema pioneers the Lumière Brothers’ works is “Workers Leaving the Factory,” a 50-second film which consists of a static shot of what its title describes. This ancestral cinematic image is echoed by several shots of Jia Zhang-ke’s extraordinary, and extraordinarily beautiful, documentary/fiction hybrid, 24 City. The film focuses on 420 Factory in Chengdu, Sichuan province, a former military munitions plant which is about to be torn down and moved to another area to make way for an ultramodern housing complex known as “24 City,” a name which has a vaguely Alphaville-esque, sci-fi tinge to it.

24 City is structured as a series of nine monologues, five of which are spoken by actual workers in the factory, and four of which are delivered by actors, including a trio of great actresses – Lu Liping, Joan Chen and Jia regular Zhao Tao, representing three generations of Chinese history. The experiences of Chinese women are very prominent in this film, much more so than in Jia’s previous work, thanks to the influence of Jia’s co-screenwriter, female poet Zhai Yongming, a native of Chengdu. This is Jia’s densest and most complex film to date, encompassing reality and fiction, and peppered with quotations from Chinese poetry and William Butler Yeats. Music, especially, plays a key role: excerpts of the Internationale play on the soundtrack, workers in the film sing both patriotic anthems and romantic pop songs, and a Chinese opera troupe (led by Joan Chen) performs within the crumbling walls of the factory.

24 City was originally conceived by Jia as a straight documentary; however, the film slowly transformed into a rich collage of stories and physical memorabilia (worker ID cards, photographs, letters) that document the changes across fifty years of Chinese history, refracted through the collective consciousness of this factory. “As far as I’m concerned, history is always a blend of facts and imagination,” Jia says in the film’s press notes. This could refer to both Maoist policies and propaganda that shaped the fortunes of this factory and to the nature of Jia’s project. Jia keeps his focus on individual human stories, a riposte to the Chinese government’s insistence on requiring workers to constantly take it on the chin for the good of society, to be displaced and replaced at will, to always be on time and never miss a day, and never protest or complain.

Far from the vapid, simpleminded analyses of China offered by most American mainstream media, Jia explores these issues with poetry and melancholic beauty. Construction and factory life have surely never been given more vivid and lyrical form than here. Although the film has its share of poignant moments, Jia manages to inject a fair amount of humor in this scenario, one example being a particularly cheeky meta-cinematic reference: Joan Chen’s character, Little Flower, is a “factory beauty” famed for her uncanny resemblance to … Joan Chen.

24 City cements Jia’s status as perhaps the most vital and poetic chronicler of present-day China, and the economic and physical changes wrought by this country’s rapid upward mobility. “I see movies as a tool to record memory,” Jia told me last year during an interview I conducted with him at last year’s New York Film Festival, after a press screening of his previous film Useless. His latest film fulfills this stated aim, and then some. The stunning, hyper-real digital images provided by cinematographers Yu Lik-wai and Wang Yu bring the history and the architecture of this factory into nearly three-dimensionally vivid focus. 24 City is initially challenging and unsettling, due to the unusual nature of his project, but Jia, as always, richly rewards the viewer’s patience, and in the final shots that cap Zhao Tao’s tour de force performance (what a treasure this actress is!), the film culminates with a stunning visual epiphany.

Click here for the schedule of screenings at the IFC Center.

Review: Jia Zhang-ke's "Still Life"

Still Life (Sanxia Haoren). 2006. Directed by Jia Zhang-ke. Written by Jia Zhang-ke, Sun Jianmin, and Guan Na. Produced by Xu Pengle, Wang Tianyun, and Zhu Jiong. Cinematography by Yu Lik-wai. Edited by Khung Jinlei. Art direction by Liang Jindong and Liu Qiang. Music by Lim Giong.

Cast: Han Sanming (Sanming), Zhao Tao (Shen Hong), Li Zhubin (Guo Bin), Wang Hongwei (Wang Dong Ming), Ma Lizhen (Missy Ma), Lan Zhou (Huang Mao, Motorcycle Taxi Driver), Xiang Haiyu (Mr. He), Zhou Lin (Brother Pony), Huang Yong (Little Yong), Luo Mingwang (Old Ma).

The title of Jia Zhang-ke’s latest feature would seem at first to be grimly ironic, since the Three Gorges Dam, around which the film’s bifurcated narrative revolves, has caused the lives of everyone around it to be anything but still. At the same time, Jia’s moody, contemplative camerawork forces us to pay attention to the impact of China’s rapid progress, especially in the year of the Beijing Olympics, which is shaping up as China’s symbolic coming-out party as an economic and cultural world power to be reckoned with. The vagaries of U.S. film distribution are such that no less than three significant Chinese films from 2006 and 2007, each provocative in its own unique way, will be released this month. The first is Still Life, one of the strongest works to date by one of China’s, and indeed the world’s, finest filmmakers. (The others are Li Yu’s Lost in Beijing and Lou Ye’s Summer Palace, both of which angered Chinese authorities, earning its respective filmmakers, and mutual producer, an official ban from the Chinese film industry).

In Still Life, Jia’s loose structure unfolds with the uncommon grace and unforced lyricism which is his forte. Almost everything we see is in an advanced state of decay and disrepair, yet possesses its own unsettling beauty. This brings to mind two recent documentaries set in China, both vivid evocations of this country’s twenty-first century industrial age: Jennifer Bachiwal’s Manufactured Landscapes, about the photography of Edward Burtynsky, and Jia’s own documentary Dong, the reality companion piece to the (mostly) fictional Still Life. As Jia told me in an interview I conducted with him last year, “I see movies as a tool to record memory.” Memory of what is rapidly being lost is one of the many eloquent themes of Jia’s film, and the loss of the past is what links the two non-converging stories he tells in Still Life.

In the first story, Sanming (Huang Sanming), a coal miner, travels from Shanxi province (also Jia’s birthplace) to the town of Fengjie to search for the wife and daughter he lost 16 years ago. Along the way he meets, and sometimes befriends, an array of fascinating characters, each of whom could be the subject of their own film. The first address Sanming searches (written on the carton of a long-defunct brand of cigarettes) is now only a strip of grass in the vast body of water created by the dam. To earn money, he participates in the same destruction that consumed his old home, helping to tear down buildings earmarked for demolition to make way for the dam. Sanming looks every inch his age, and every year seems to have taken its toll on him. Yet, there remains within him an irrepressible spirit, and he strives to make amends for neglecting important matters in his younger years. Despite being a willing agent in the destruction of his country’s memory, his efforts to mend his personal life and to fully connect his past and his future place him in sharp contrast to his government and its headlong rush to destroy centuries of culture in order to pursue an insanely rapid pace of prosperity. The death of one of the men he befriends leads directly to his own symbolic rebirth, when at the conclusion of his story he returns to Shanxi with a renewed life purpose. Jia’s beautifully nuanced rendering of Sanming’s story eschews simple despair and agitprop anger in order to create a more poetic vision of life’s circularity and ability to encompass humor and melancholy, tragedy and beauty.

In the second story, Shen Hong (Jia regular Zhao Tao, marvelous), a nurse, searches for her husband Guo Bin (Li Zhubin), who abandoned her two years before. She goes to his workplace, where her husband, much like Sanming, works on demolishing buildings. Unlike Sanming, however, Guo Bin is in a much higher social class, overseeing of a large staff. To complement his official employees, he also hires local thugs to persuade those reluctant to leave their homes to make way for the demolition. As Shen Hong searches for her husband, she incessantly drinks water, filling her bottle along the way, a sly reference to the vast body of water that is submerging Fengjie as a result of the dam. Shen Hong’s story ends with a subtle twist that is remarkable for the almost throw-away manner in which it is delivered. This clues us in to the fact that Jia is less interested in narrative than he is in the palpable mood of loss and disappearance.

Although Sanming and Shen Hong never meet, their stories are connected by an odd visual trope (which I won’t give away), which counteracts the downbeat realism of the film’s scenario, and exhibits a playfulness of form that tempers the sadness which permeates the film. Still Life, which earned Jia a Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival, continues an extraordinary body of work that always privileges humanism over politics and ideology, and uses cinema as a tool for this quest to powerful effect.

Still Life is released by New Yorker Films and opens in New York on January 18 at the IFC Center.

Banquet of the Fearless Golden Flying Daggers

An interesting piece today in Variety on the Chinese film industry's seemingly insatiable appetite for lavish period martial-arts themed extravaganzas such as Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower (above), Feng Xiaogang's The Banquet (below), Ronny Yu's Fearless, and surely many more to come. Censorship is surely a culprit in this trend, since clearly fantasies of China's distant past are much safer for producers and investors, than say, films by such directors as Jia Zhangke who offer incisive, and often quite critical portraits of contemporary China. Jia's latest, the Venice Golden Lion-winner Still Life, found it impossible to get a screen in edgewise with Golden Flower dominating the market.

Peter Ho-Sun Chan, a great director who made one of my favorite Hong Kong films, indeed, one of my favorite films period, Comrades: Almost a Love Story, as well as the haunting "Going Home," a section of the horror anthology Three, is also getting into the game, following up his musical Perhaps Love with This Violent Land, a $40 million epic to star Jet Li, Andy Lau, and Takeshi Kaneshiro.

These expensive epics, with more lushly decorated sets and star power than you could throw a million flying daggers at, certainly make for a financially robust industry, but at what cost? For me, the genre reached a nadir with Chen Kaige's laughable contribution The Promise. I do look forward to seeing both Golden Flower and The Banquet, and hope to post reviews of both these films here soon. But it is rather a shame that such filmmakers as Jia, Wang Xiaoshuai (whose Shanghai Dreams was one of the best films I saw last year), Zhu Wen (Seafood, South of the Clouds), and others who are responsible for one of the most creatively fertile periods in Chinese film history, can't get their films shown in their own country.