In
addition to being the great American modernist poet, Wallace Stevens was also
vice-president of The Hartford insurance company. He would have surely been familiar
with expense reports and per diems. “Shu” is a much shaggier kind of poet. Not
a lot of business will get done on his trip through Xinjiang, but it will
result in sixteen poems. Ju Anqi followed the poet-“actor” through the Uyghur
Autonomous Region for forty days, eventually culling his footage into the
strange travelogue-hybrid-documentary Poet
on a Business Trip (trailer
here), which
screens as part of this year’s Art of the Real.
Some
of Shu’s verse evokes a sense of mystery, whereas some of it has the ring of
hipster pretention. Nobody bats a thousand. One thing is clear, he is much more
a Chinese Charles Bukowski than a Wallace Stevens. We will often see him drink
and hire the services of prostitutes. He will even show the Full Monty, several
times.
Trip was filmed in
2002, but its completion was temporarily derailed by a falling out between
director and subject. Fourteen years later, minority Uyghur separatists have
made Xinjiang a much tenser and fractious place. Frankly, at the time, it would
have been relatively encouraging to see Shu’s debauchery could be so readily
accepted and catered to in the Muslim dominated provincial towns.
In
fact, several of the film’s most revealing scenes capture Shu’s conversations
with prostitutes. Much of what they have to say about the economic
opportunities and social standing of single women over thirty remains timely
today. Unfortunately, there is an excessive surfeit of scenes of Shu sitting on
buses and jitneys, distractedly staring out the window. Viewers will likely
wish there was more of his conversations with his hired women, as well as the
six or seven-year-old girl whose youngest infant sibling had recently passed
away.
