Life
is cheap in China’s northern coal mines, especially Zhang Baomin’s miserable
hardscrabble existence, but good luck trying to cash him in. The mute miner has
a titanium skull and a quicksilver temper. When his young son mysteriously disappears,
Zhang return home to search for him, one brawl at a time, in Xin Yukun’s Wrath of Silence (trailer here), which screens
during the 2018 Seattle International Film Festival.
Zhang
has been mute since he accidentally bit his own tongue off during a youthful melee.
Lately, he has been working in a mine in a neighboring district, to avoid awkward
encounters with the mutton-house proprietor, whose left eye was blinded during
a violent tussle with the miner. There is not a lot of love for Zhang among the
villagers, but they still have a good deal of sympathy for him when Lei
mysteriously vanishes while tending his sheep.
The
dour Zhang hits the pavement, showing Lei’s picture around. That is how he
finds himself at another mine, just when goons from Chang Wannian’s mining
empire come to break up the joint. They weren’t counting on a hothead like
Zhang being there. Zhang’s subsequent meeting with Chang is supposed to
intimate him into passivity, but instead, it leads the brawling father to
suspect the mogul is responsible for his son’s disappearance. He will
definitely follow up on that, but not in a very subtle manner. To add further
complications, Chang’s witness-tampering attorney Xu Wenjie is under
investigation, which turns up the pressure on him.
Wrath could very well be
the most violent socially-aware class-conscious film possibly ever produced in
the history of cinema. Compared to Zhang, Wolverine is a hand-wringing doormat.
There are times when Xin is clearly riffing on the hallway fight in the
original Oldboy, but he tries his
best to top its brutality. Yet, the corrupt and arbitrary nature of the
contemporary Chinese legal system and social structures is always readily
apparent. In fact, Wrath is closely
akin to Chang Zheng’s Explosion, both
stylistically and ideologically, but it is more action-driven, by at least a
factor of five.
Even
though he never speaks a peep, Song Yang is absolutely riveting as Zhang. You
can practically see the black smoke coming out of his ears, in what could very
well be his best performance to date. As Chang, Jiang Wu manages to chew even
more scenery than he did in Shock Wave,
which is definitely saying something. Yuan Wenkang’s Xu is quite a cold fish,
but that is what the film requires—and he delivers accordingly.
Xin’s
previous film A Coffin in the Mountain
was more of a twisty noir in the spirit of early Coen Brothers, but Wrath has a similarly keen sense of
place. He hails from Baotao, Inner Mongolia, so he clearly has a deep understanding
of the people and the hardships they face. Yet, there is so much hard-charging
mayhem, it is easy to forget you are watching an incisive critique of Chinese
inequities.
