CineCina ’19: The Shadow Play

Historically speaking, the leading cause of political corruption has been questions of land use, so it almost goes without saying a successful real estate development company must be up to their eyeballs in graft in a society like Mainland China, where public corruption is so pervasive. That is certainly the case for Violet Gold Real Estate, an outfit whose meteoric success is particularly suspicious since its founder’s seed capitol came from Taiwan. As a Communist Party member, it was Tang Yijie’s job to know where the bodies were buried, until he became one of them in Lou Ye’s The Shadow Play, which screened as part of this year’s CineCina Film Festival—and is currently available for viewing on international American Airlines flights under its alternate title, Cloud in the Wind.

In the stunningly cinematic opening sequences, a riot breaks out in a Guangzhou slum, where Violet Gold is evicting longtime residents for the sake of a high-profile development scheme. Tang is dispatched to make peace and deal with the media, but instead, a shadowy figure pushes him off a roof, impaling him on a piece of rebar. Hot-shot police detective Yang Jiadong starts working the case, quickly concluding Tang’s not-so-grieving widow Lin Hui and Violet Gold’s founder Jiang Zicheng are most likely involved in the crime and with each other. He also suspects the unsolved disappearance of Lian Ah Yun, Jiang’s lieutenant and a close friend of Lin, is somehow related. Unfortunately, his investigation will be slightly sidetracked when the tabloid media catches him sleeping with Lin, one of his leading suspects.

Shadow Play is an epic noir that spans decades and indicts just about every level of Mainland society. It is easy to see why the state authorities kept the film on pins and needles waiting for the authorization for its international premiere. Frankly, it is rather surprising it was finally granted at the last minute, but not for reasons of quality. This is a flat-out masterwork from Lou—arguably even a masterpiece. It functions as a crime drama with brutal efficiency, but it also has the sweep and dramatic irony of classical tragedy.

Just about the entire cast deserves award consideration, starting first and foremost with Song Jia, who covers the terrain between femme fatale and deeply-wronged victim with compelling ferocity. Qin Hao similarly keeps the audience guessing with his intense yet ambiguously mysterious turn as Jiang. Completing the primary triangle, Zhang Songwen is absolutely loathsome yet acutely human as the “victim,” Tang.

NYAFF ’14: Blind Massage

Real massage therapists have anatomical and physiological training to rival doctors, but it remains a widely misunderstood profession. Perhaps in hopes of separating the therapeutic and sensual connotations, it has been one of the few avenues of employment traditionally open to the blind in China. The so-called “doctors” of such a Nanjing clinic are highly skilled, but also deeply human. Their lives will connect and conflict in Lou Ye’s ensemble drama Blind Massage (clip here), which screens during the 2014 New York Asian Film Festival.

The staff is blind, but the patients are entirely sighted, at least as far as we know. That itself is a role reversal. The Sha Zongqi Massage Centre is run by the gregarious Sha Fuming and his reserved partner, Zhang Zongqi, who always try to place new therapists in need of work. Their latest two recruits come with issues. Sullen Xiao Ma gradually lost his sight during his early teen years and has yet to come to terms with his blindness. In contrast, Dr. Wang had once amassed a sizable nest egg, but he lost it all during the financial crisis, forcing him to ask his old friend Sha for a job.

The relationships between staff members will become complicated, like a Chinese massage version of ER. Xiao Ma will be recklessly attracted to Dr. Wang’s partial sighted fiancée Kong, before developing a full-on obsession for local (fully sighted) prostitute Xiao Man. Despite Xiao Ma’s frequent brothel patronage, his beautiful colleague Du Hong nurses an attraction to him, while rebuffing the advances of the desperately lonely Sha.

About a dozen other characters factor into the mix somehow. Frankly, Blind Massage is a bit unwieldy with subplots, but it is hard to say where to cut, because they each work on their own terms. The film was adapted by Lou’s documentary filmmaker wife Ma Yingli from Bei Feiyu’s novel that has already been produced as a multi-part television drama—and it is easy to imagine these characters working in a telenovela format.

However, Lou’s approach is distinctly cinematic, approaching the experimental. His past films have directly raised issues of perception (particularly last year’s NYAFF selection, Mystery), but he takes it in a different direction during Blind Massage, visibly reducing the light and softening the focus during scenes driven by blind characters and reverting to standard levels for sequences involving sighted characters or expository housekeeping. He also employs a narrator to read the unseen credits and provide background information on characters, evoking the experience of enhanced visual descriptions.

Blind Massage captures the arbitrary unfairness of life in vivid terms, but that also offers an opportunity for unlikely cast-members to shine. As a case in point, Guo Xiaodong’s Dr. Wang seems rather unassuming, until blowing the doors off the joint in a confrontation with loan sharks dogging his irresponsible sighted younger brother. It is a scene and a performance worthy of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.

Mei Ting also pulls the emotional rug out from under us, as the ostensibly standoffish, Du Hong. She resents the fuss made by her colleagues (especially Sha) over the beauty they can never see, yet experiences some of the film’s greatest heartsickness.

On its face, Blind Massage is totally apolitical, but You is still pushing boundaries with its uncomfortable intimacy and matter-of-fact description of contemporary Chinese life for any sort of underdog population. It seems downright tame by our standards, but considering the Puritanism of Communist censors, many scenes represent no small risk to You’s standing. Yet, they are never gratuitous, well serving the characters’ emotional development at crucial junctures. Despite a bit of narrative messiness, it is an engrossing film that pulls viewers into the lives on screen in a vivid, ambitiously experiential way. Recommended for mature audiences, Blind Massage screens tomorrow (6/30) and Wednesday (7/2) at the Walter Reade Theater, as part of this year’s NYAFF.

NYAFF '13: Mystery

Chinese film censors often seem to get rather acute cases of “approver’s remorse.”  After allowing Lou Ye to screen his latest film at Cannes (to general acclaim) they suddenly demanded the director edit two“violent” scenes before allowing his film a Mainland theatrical release.  Considering several of Lou’s films have been banned outright in China and the filmmaker has openly defied a state imposed five year filmmaking prohibition in the past, this arguably represents progress. As with his previous work, the Party bureaucrats are protecting the public from an excellent film.  New Yorkers can judge for themselves when Lou’s Mystery (trailer here), screens today at the 2013 New York Asian Film Festival.

Like most of contemporary China, the industrial city of Wuhan is sharply divided between the have’s and the have-not’s.  In the opening scene, a reckless group of have’s runs over a woman. Their first response is neither compassion nor remorse.  Hold that thought.  Lou will return to the woman on the motorway in due time.  However, he abruptly shifts his focus to Yongzhao, who is striving to become one of the have’s.  As a result, he works late hours, leaving his wife Lu Jie to care for their endearing young daughter, An-an.

One day after school, Lu Jie is asked out on a playdate by Sang Qi.  She is not particularly keen to get to know the woman, but An-an clearly gets on with the woman’s son like two peas in a pod. Reluctantly agreeing to subsequently meet the woman for lunch, Lu Jie is rather uncomfortable when Sang Qi asks for advice on how to handle her cheating husband.  At that moment, Lu Jie observes her husband across the street, entering a hotel with a woman who is most definitely not herself.

Coincidences do play a role in Mystery, but many things happen for reasons not immediately apparent.  Indeed, the police investigation of the opening incident will ultimately involve several of the film’s primary characters. These cases are called crimes of passion, correct?

In the past Lou has addressed topics like homosexuality and Tiananmen Square, which are absolutely radioactive as far as Party bureaucrats are concerned.  Mystery implies much about contemporary China’s growing class inequities and the collapse of traditional values, but as an ostensive film noir, it is obviously much less controversial. Domestic critics have often unfairly rapped Lou for his supposed Euro-art house style, but in this case viewers can sort of see it.  One might more readily compare his latest to Louis Malle’s Damage than Lou’s Digital Generation-esque Spring Fever.

The star of Lou’s Summer Palace (a tragic love story bound up in the Tiananmen Square protests that went over with the censors like a lead balloon), Hao Lei is scary good as Lu Jie.  She takes the audience on quite a ride with her character’s arc of development, vividly illustrating what “a woman scorned” means.  Likewise, Qi Xi plays the seemingly naïve Sang Qi with surprising subtly and power.  Keep your eyes on them both.

Without question, Mystery is a film for mature adults. While there are exponentially more violent films at this year’s fest, Lou presents the occasional outbreaks in disturbingly intimate terms. Taut and sophisticated, Mystery amply rewards viewers who indulgence its plot contrivances.  An important new work from a truly independent filmmaker and an accomplished cast, Mystery is very highly recommended when it screens tonight (7/3) and next Thursday afternoon (7/11) at the Walter Reade Theater, as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Lou Ye’s Spring Fever

Lou Ye’s first film was censored by the Chinese government. His next film was banned outright and he was formally barred from filmmaking for two years. A subsequent film would earn Lou another five year term of banishment that has yet to expire, but he simply produced his latest film rebel style, completely outside the Chinese system, with foreign financing and distribution. After directly referencing the Tiananmen Square massacre in Summer Palace (the film that earned his five year prohibition), it seems like Lou deliberately sought out the only third rail he had yet to address on film: homosexual relations in China. After its brief American theatrical run, Lou’s Spring Fever (trailer here) is now available on DVD.

It would grossly overstate matters to call Luo Haitao an investigator. He is really just an unemployed sneak, hired by the jealous Lin Xue to tail her husband. Her suspicions prove correct. Wang Ping is indeed having an affair with Jiang Cheng—a guy. Not knowing what Lin knows, Wang introduces her to Jiang as a supposed long lost school chum, hoping to have an excuse to keep him around.

That works about as well as you would expect. Especially bitter the other woman is a man, Lin confronts Jiang in his office, making her complaints explicitly clear, costing him mucho face. As a result, Jiang does indeed drop the straying husband, picking up unlikely enough with the ostensibly heterosexual Luo. Once again, Jiang is one third of a love triangle, completed by Luo’s highly vulnerable girlfriend Li Jing.

While refraining from full frontal, Spring’s gay sex scenes do not leave much to imagination. There are quite a few of them too. In fact, they would get decidedly tiresome if they did not represent one big, bold extended middle finger to the Chinese state censors. Just making the film was an act of defiance. Tackling such taboo themes in the process certainly earns Lou considerable credit for guts.

Lou also elicits some memorable performances, particularly from his two women supporting players, oddly enough. As the understandably hurt and resentful Lin, Jiang Jiaqi is riveting in her smack-down scenes with Wang and Jiang. Likewise, Tan Zhuo is oddly affecting as Li, a woman economically victimized by her dodgy boss and emotionally confused by Luo’s new found ambiguity. However, considering how much screen time they have, neither Qin Hao nor Chen Sicheng make much impression as Jiang and his new formerly straight lover, respectively. They are almost like naked props for Lou to mold and objectify as he sees fit.

Still, there is far greater narrative substance to Spring than many of the distinctly unhurried films produced by China’s so-called Digital Generation of independent filmmakers. In fact, there are a number of jarring developments and telling moments, as when Luo first sets eyes on Li’s new boyish bob. There is even an evocative non-diegetic soundtrack from Iranian film composer and classical pianist Peyman Yazdanian, who also scored the fateful Palace and films by Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, and Ramin Bahrani.

If nothing else, Spring is certainly proof of Lou’s artistic integrity. It is about as independent as indie filmmaking gets, short of landing in jail like Panahi. While the sexualized content will limit its appeal, it is surprisingly accessible stylistically. A somewhat flawed but still worthy film, Spring has recently been released on DVD and streams on Netflix.