Gansu
lies in the crossroads between the countries of Tibet, Mongolia, and Mainland
China’s Muslim provinces. You will find more spiritualism than commercialism
there. Like many young Chinese citizens, Ga Gui left home in search of greener
economic pastures in the city. However, a premonition of her father’s death
brings her home in Chai Chunya’s hallucinatory Four Ways to Die in My Hometown (trailer here), which screens as
part of Cinema on the Edge, a retrospective tribute to the Beijing Independent
Film Festival now playing in New York at Anthology Film Archives.
Despite
Ga Gui’s sudden sense of urgency, her father has been dying for years—and he
certainly has not been graceful about it. Increasingly senile, the old man
raves against the world from the apparent comfort of his coffin, which he has
not left for seven years. Understandably, her little sister is delighted to see
Ga Gui, especially since she has just had her own encounter with some sort of
holy fool in the mountains.
Although
she lives in the city, Ga Gui is highly attuned to nature and animals. She can
whisper sense into the family’s errant camel, but her powers are earthly in
nature. Seeing the spirit world is the purview of others, who have much around
them to see. This village is profoundly haunted, by ghosts of both the supernatural
and metaphorical kind. Two old puppeteers are determined to exercise some of
the latter through a performance, but their third colleague refuses to
participate, perhaps because they were never very good at their craft. They
started performing during the Cultural Revolution, after the fevered state had
rounded up all the great masters.
Hometown is inspired by the
four Tibetan elements, but Chai is not exactly slavish about underscoring the
given themes in each part of his tetraptych. In fact, the narrative is
definitely rather loose, safely fitting under the experimental rubric. Instead
of delving into melodrama or teachable moments, Hometown serves as the ghost at the banquet—the gibbering reminder
of all the dark secrets China has chained up in its rural attics. Sometimes it
really makes no sense, but it is always primal.
Fortunately,
Chai has a painter’s eye for visual composition, because he does not give the
audience much else to latch onto. Granted, the soundtrack is truly hypnotic,
but the trance-like state it helps induce is almost counter-productive. This is
a deliberately disorienting film that is in no hurry to reveal its deeper
meanings. Yet, there are moments here and there that resonate with clarity. Chai’s
casting instincts are also rock solid, starting with the earthy yet
otherworldly Ga Gui.
