(Warning: plot twists and general story for all three films discussed in detail!)
Three films about children
Some weeks back I talked to some kids about the Philippines, showed them Lino Brocka's Insiang and Ramona Diaz's Imelda and then moved on to talk about China. End of that series of lectures I decided to show them a film that I thought would give them an idea of if not present-day China at least China at a transitory stage, from being a purely communist country to a country with a communist government and capitalist economy.
Zhang Yimou's Yi ge dou bu neng shao (Not One Less, 1999)--his finest film, in my opinion, is about a substitute teacher named Wei who is promised a bonus if she can keep her students attending school. It's a portrait of what life is like for the majority, the people who live in the countryside and (as opposed to urban dwellers) struggle to comply with the government-mandated nine years of schooling; even in recent years the issue of education in the countryside is still a problem. "This would have been before China's economy really started kicking in," I reminded them. "Even in China, the countryside's usually the last to benefit."
Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia (Curse of the Golden Flower, Zhang Yimou, 2006)Excerpt:I'm not sure if we can call Zhang Yimou a great filmmaker, but in the '80s and '90s he was certainly a force to be reckoned with. For director Chen Kaige he shot "Huang tu di" (Yellow Earth, 1984), a film that announced to the world the presence of the "Fifth Generation" of mainland Chinese filmmakers; three years later, with "Hong gao liang" (Red Sorghum), "Ju Dou" (1990), and "Da hong deng long gao gao gua" (Raise the Red Lantern, 1991) Zhang helped establish the house style of the Fifth Generation--at once old-fashioned in its embrace of melodrama ("Ju Dou" owes a plot twist or two to "The Postman Always Rings Twice") yet new in its utter lack of cynicism (the unabashedly romantic flavor of "Hong gao liang's" love scene); voluptuous in its use of colors, shapes, textures (the dyed cloth in "Ju Dou" filling the screen with ribbons of fluttering scarlet, purple, gold) yet somehow austere in intent and ultimate impact (repeated shots of the compound's imposing rectangular floor plan in "Da hong deng" emphasizing the heroine's imprisonment). The 1999 "Yi ge dou bu neng shao" (Not One Less) subordinated that gorgeous visual style to the story of a young teacher struggling to keep her class of poor student peasants together. The result, I thought, was a film more persuasively moving (thanks to its countryside grit and simplicity) than any of his earlier efforts.
He's struggled ever since, sometimes in interesting ways: "Wo de fu qin mu qin" (The Road Home, 1999) is a romance told in flashbacks, as the lovers' son arrives from the big city to bury his just-died father (I liked it well enough, save that the mother seemed a tad too self-indulgent); "Xingfu shiguang" (Happy Times, 2001) felt like a reworking of Charlie Chaplin's "City Life" (blind girl given the illusion of a better life by an equally poor benefactor) and suffers in comparison (you also couldn't help but feel sexually predatory overtones--all these middle-aged men, surrounding a helpless blind girl--in what Zhang strenuously tries to present as an innocuous situation).
Curse of the Golden Flower is interesting, to say the least. Cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding's work isn't as precise or elegant as Chris Doyle's in Hero, and while the action director Ching Siu Tung has the chops to rival Yuen Woo Ping (he directed A Chinese Ghost Story, and did the action choreography for Peking Opera Blues, among many others), Zhang still doesn't quite know how to photograph his choreography--too many cuts, in too confusing a fashion (give me Ronny Yu's direction in Fearless--still the finest martial-arts action film I've seen in recent years).I think Zhang Yimou knew this, and tried to compensate by going berserk on the costumes and sets--Gong Li's gowns rival Princess Amidala's in ungainliness, and her nails seem to have been done by the same manicurist that does Ming the Merciless; Chow Yun Fat's headgear could have been King Midas' underwear, and you don't want me started on his throne, a hemorrhoid sufferer's literally wet dream.Much of it is lush, of course, but I thought the hot pinks, neon greens and radioactive blues were a bit much--think of a supermutated Szechwan restaurant grown to monstrous proportions, or Ridley Scott's Blade Runner set in the Tang Dynasty, only with less restraint. I'm not kidding, you have to see this; it's the kind of production design found in multimillion dollar adaptations of cyberpunk graphic novels, only these are for the most part real sets, not CGI-generated nightmares (when they are CGI, they look patently fake). Maybe my favorite comment on the sets claims they look as if they had been done by someone 'channeling Liberace' (on hallucinogens, maybe).All that aside, it does get compelling, in a The Lion in Winter meets Married With Children meets Henrik Ibsen way; the revelation scene--where mistress confronts wife confronts husband confronts children, ugly truths are revealed, and a brother gapes at his sister in mute horror--should go down in history as a great camp classic.The basis of the story is Cao Yu's classic Thunderstorm, which single-handedly established modern Chinese 'spoken' theater (as opposed to traditionally 'sung' Chinese opera). Cao Yu (who believe it or not played Nora in a production of A Doll's House--make of that what you will) was critical of communism, but seeing as how the play portrays the bourgeois as inbreeding decadent bastards, the Chinese authorities have wholeheartedly adopted it as one of their own, which may be the reason why Zhang is able to get away with startling moments and imagery under the guise of all that imperial (read; bourgeois) criticism.It's the scenes of rebellion that makes the film worthwhile: with monumental sets (is that the Forbidden City doubling as a Tang palace?) and literally thousands of extras--the kind of human extravagance today's Hollywood can only dream about--Zhang fashions a startling re-enactment of the Tiananmen Square massacre, complete with tanklike structures inexorably crushing heroic dissidents. He follows it up with a startlingly efficient cleanup job, then by the most ghastly of aftermaths: an invitation of all concerned, rebellious and repressive alike, to sit down together at dinner. It's a sequence of such massive violence and subsequently profound perversity it takes your breath away--I remember a line from James Goldman's play where Eleanor of Aquitaine declares "we are the source of corruption!" but never has both source and consequence been so comprehensively and vividly realized.Those closing sequences alone justify the film's existence, wipe away all (well--most) suspicions of Zhang selling out (forgiving him his awkward dabblings into the wuxia-pian genre along the way) and establish the man as potentially the finest, arguably the most ambitious, definitely the nuttiest impresario of large-scale spectacles in the world today.Yep--the world today. Ridley Scott can still do the occasional superproduction, and I hear James Cameron is going all-out digital for his next 200 million dollar bonfire of vanity, but I submit Zhang, with his house style of old-fashioned spectacle cannily extended by CGI effects (still clumsy, but working on it, working on it), backed by the might of the world's most vital economy, will for better or worse (even now I see both possibilities) be the filmmaker to beat in the future. That's my prophecy, right there--you heard it from me first.
