A TOUCH OF SIN (Tian zhu
ding)
A
China Japan (133 mi) 2013
‘Scope d: Jia Zhang-ke
One of the few award winning films at Cannes this year, winning
the best screenplay, which one might question, as the supreme directorial
flourish is usually what sets a Jia Zhang-ke film apart from the rest, but as
it turns out, it’s an extremely well-written story that continues to surprise
right through to the end. Offering a rather blistering comment on what
it’s like living in China at the moment, where citizens are in a Kafkaesque
situation forced to endure unthinkable realities where there is literally no
escape from the unending comedy of horrors inflicted upon them by the powers
that be, as the government attempts to offer an alternative to generations of
totalitarian communism, but the introduction of capitalism has produced a black
market economy that resembles the Russian mafia. How is any ordinary citizen
supposed to deal with the unlimited power and reach of those guys? The
distance between the “haves” and the “have nots” is even more unfathomable,
where most everyone continues to have nothing while a privileged few hoard it
all. In Jia’s hands, it’s a near surreal landscape, where he continually
mixes in pictures of a haunting past into the present, effectively using images
of shrines, pagodas, and classical art contrasted against the busy city
streets, where the looming presence of the past is evident everywhere.
Through the lens of cinematographer Nelson Yu Lik-wai, the director continues
to provide films of ravishing beauty, where the poetic visualizations are often
spectacular, and this is no exception, but there is also an intrusion of darkness,
utter brutality, and ruthlessness, leaving behind a particularly empty void of
responsibility, where Chinese citizens are continually expected to do more with
less. The picture of life in China, ranging from the busy southern
metropolis of Guangzhou to the more rural townships in Jia's home province of
Shanxi, couldn’t be more bleak, where the promise of brighter days ahead
appears stained in blood and tears.
What this film does express, unlike anything else this
arthouse director has ever done, are grandiose, somewhat spectacular, spectacle
sequences of graphic violence, where it appears he even turns to the martial
arts wuxia genre form, as incredible as that sounds, while other scenes
resemble the Charles Bronson vigilante justice style movie, with irate citizens
taking matters into their own hands. But the appalling idea of Chinese
citizens resorting to guns to exact justice or revenge has the feel of western
fantasia, like some kind of idealized dream sequence similar to Bobcat Goldthwaite’s
raucous American satire God
Bless America (2011), as China prides itself as being different than the
excessively violent images continually coming out of the gun-happy West, yet
here it is thoroughly entrenched in the grim realism of everyday Chinese life
depicted, where people are backed into a corner feeling they have no other
choice. At the Cannes Film Festival press conference the director
acknowledged the film would have to be edited to play in China, as we see a
variety in choices of weapons used, from hand axes, meat cleavers, shovels,
crowbars, hand guns, shotguns, and knives, where the neverending barrage of
assaults does reflect the extreme degree of economic and psychological damage
citizens are forced to endure, where they are pushed to the breaking point of
near insanity, resorting to such extreme means only because the options are
otherwise dire or nonexistent. That said, this is a work of rare
intelligence and cold observation, where you’ll be hard pressed to find this
kind of acute criticism coming out of China, or even America for that
matter. While this is a series of interconnected stories that actually
happened in real life and will be compared to other similarly written movies,
like the broad overreach of interglobal (“We are all connected”)
interconnectivity in the Guillermo Arriaga stories of Alejandro González
Iñárritu’s movies like AMORES PERROS (2000), 21 GRAMS (2003), or BABEL (2006),
or the conniving, manipulative nature of Paul Haggis’s CRASH (2004), this is
not like any of them, and comparisons seem frivolous, as Jia has his focus
clearly on what’s happening “inside” China and never points his camera or his
insights elsewhere.
While it all unravels with an element of surprise, the
director uses four different characters to carry out the existing themes that
are raised throughout the film, where characters overlap, but not the
storyline, including Dahai (Jiang Wu), a frustrated coal miner in Shanxi
province whose outrage hits the boiling point when the corrupt capitalist
owners sell off the collective property of the mine without paying dividends to
the workers, driving brand new Maserati and Audi cars, even a private jet, and
then refuse to even discuss the matter afterwards. Zhou San (Wang
Baoqiang) is a nomadic migrant worker on a motorcycle (wearing a Chicago Bulls
cap!) with a secret inner life that is never revealed, but he apparently makes
a living off of his own inflicted road kill. Xiao Yu, Jia’s frequent
actress and real life wife, Zhao Tao, is conflicted over a longterm affair with
a married man while working as a receptionist at a spa. Within the span
of a few hours, she is both assaulted by the man’s family at work, while also forced
to violently fend off unwanted advances from drunken businessmen who expect
sexual favors for their wads of cash. And finally Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan)
is a young factory worker who is blamed for an accident at the plant, fleeing
to a neighboring city where he gets a job in an upscale hotel that provides sex
services for its disgustingly wealthy customers, one of whom is amusingly
played by the director himself, catering to their every need, where he falls
for one of the attractive comfort girls (Li Vivien), but is doomed by her
relentlessly demanding subservience to the customer’s needs. Finding
another job in yet another mindless factory, he finds himself living a hellish
existence in a ghetto styled high rise building, where the neighboring building
is a mirror image, ironically called the Oasis of Prosperity, revealing row
upon row of laundry hanging outside on the line. The sense of confined
suffocation is certainly prevalent in three of the four characters, where the
fourth resorts to criminal behavior to get out from under it. For him
(Zhou San), living at home with his family in a dead end town is equally
suffocating.
It’s a brilliantly conceived film that reveals the depths of
complexity through multiple characters experiencing their own agonizing sense
of loss and suffering, where each strand of the story reflects a certain
dehumanization associated with economic prosperity. In each, they
escalate to an outburst of violence while also showing a deeply layered
societal sense of indifference and alienation, where an overriding fatalism
seems to be choking the very life out of people. Separated from any real
meaning or connection to one another, individuals are forced to live in tiny
spaces that resemble prisons from which they have no escape. The working
environment especially holds such an oppressive and hostile look of vacuous
sterility that it resembles the meticulousness of Austrian documentaries like
Nicolaus Geyrhalter’s OUR DAILY BREAD (2005) or Michael Glawogger’s
WORKINGMAN’S DEATH (2005), or more specifically the stunning power reflected in
the seemingly endless opening shot of Jennifer Baichwall’s MANUFACTURED
LANDSCAPES (2006), seen here Stars Of The Lid - Taphead (12:55)
in the first seven and a half minutes, though the clip adds music that is not
in the film, and it quickly cuts away before the shot actually comes to a slow
stop, finally holding on a worker asleep at his station. The slow
tracking shot down a side aisle of a huge Chinese iron assembly plant of 23,000
workers reveals endless rows of bright yellow-shirted factory workers sitting
at their work stations performing a synchronized monotony of repetitious
motions, many of whom seem relieved to stop and stare at the camera’s obvious
intrusion, where the accumulation of ever-expanding space defies all known
concepts of rationality. These technological wastelands drive the
nation’s economy but leave the workers doomed to indifference and
solitude. With another outstanding musical score by Lim Giong, formerly
working with Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia’s aesthetic is characterized by
images of loneliness and alienation, often cast in silence, where the classical
past comments upon the present, as the individual is sucked into this vacuous
emptiness that is his place in life. The violence in the film is often
raw and brutal, but it’s shown alongside rampant corruption, grotesque factory
accidents, low wages, human rights abuses, and spectacular wealth and growth,
where according to the director, “The expansion in China has been so fast,
there’s been no room for the system to catch up with any humanity.” A
brooding and atmospheric film, using disturbing genre forms to express his own
personal outrage (and perhaps to connect to a wider mass audience), Jia offers
a bravely honest and bewilderingly angry sense of defiance.
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