Dog Days (San fu tian)

DOG DAYS (San fu tian)        B                                            

China  (95 mi)  2016  d:  Jordan Schiele

Not sure if the title is a direct reference to the scathingly depressive 2001 Austrian film satire by Ulrich Seidl taking place in the oppressively hot days of summer in the outlying suburbs of Vienna, but this American filmmaker from Brooklyn, New York would surely be aware of the connection.  His path to Chinese filmmaking began with Chinese classes at NYU in college before studying abroad at Oxford University, moving to Shanghai where he worked on film sets for a year before studying film for three years in Singapore, working as a cinematographer before finally moving to Beijing, where this film is co-produced by two Hong Kong production companies.  Borrowing on the same theme of sweltering summer heat, this American in Hong Kong developed his first feature film as part of the Cannes Cinefondation Residence which premiered at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival in the Panorama line up.  A gloomy travelogue set in the seedy underside of modern day China, the nearly colorless film exposes typically hard-edged and dark themes, where it has all the makings of a modern day noir, yet it’s a film that defies category.  Centered around a towering performance from the lead character who spends the entire film in heels and hot pants, Lulu, Huang Lu from Li Yang’s BLIND MOUNTAIN (2007), in one of the performances of the year, is an exotic dancer at a cheap nightclub in the outskirts of Changsha in southern China, where the girls can be seen fanning themselves in the stifling heat, Dog Days | Film | Trailer OmeU | critic.de YouTube (1:10).  Frustrated that her boyfriend doesn’t pick her up after work, she has to walk home instead in the wee hours of the morning, but by the time she gets home the house is locked and there is no sign of her infant son.  A bit frantic to find her boyfriend Bai Long (Tian Muchen), the father of the child, and desperate to find her baby, she pursues other nightclubs in hopes of finding him, which leads her to Sunny, Luo Lanshan from Zhang-ke’s 2013 Top Ten List #3 A Touch of Sin (Tian zhu ding), a young drag queen performer at a transvestite bar known as The Night Cat who may have an existing relationship with Bai Long.  Remaining secretive about his whereabouts, as he does about hiding his gender identity, Sunny agrees to lead Lulu to Bai Long and their baby if she promises not to go to the police and agrees to give up Bai Long.  

Initially skeptical of Sunny’s promise to help her, Lulu has no other options, so the next day they take the overnight train to Shanghai.  More than anything else, this is an atmospheric subterranean journey that exposes a dark underbelly rarely seen in China, thoroughly drenched in sweat and desperation, often shot in a shadowy world by cinematographer Nathanael Carton. What’s interesting is the extent of her internalization, including her fears of being an unmarried woman raising a child alone, seen early on storing breast milk even while working at a strip club, now forced to come to grips with the horrors of China’s one-child policy.  One of the more revealing scenes of maternal longing is watching Lulu breastfeeding a sleeping woman’s baby on the train, creating a feeling of puzzling discomfort with the viewer, yet it beautifully expresses just how strongly she’s been violated, as that maternal yearning doesn’t subside, but it feeds into her driving desire to reunite with her child.  In Shanghai, Sunny leads her to a dilapidated hotel where they get little help from the front desk clerk, refusing to acknowledge the names of hotel guests, who instead thrives in a Kafkaesque world of nameless bureaucrats just doing their job, but feeding into a sinister mood of malice.  Resigned to a fate of obstacles and roadblocks along the way, Lulu checks in anyway, while Sunny vanishes into his own ghostly existence, where the narrative cleverly interweaves three different kinds of love, heterosexual, homosexual, and maternal, though the first two are only briefly touched upon, with Bai Long’s initial meeting with Sunny shown in flashback, where they are never allowed to expand their character limitations, while the last is the only love that’s thoroughly explored with any depth.  Sunny meets secretly with Bai Long, though their scenes together are completely unremarkable, almost feeling unnecessary, overwhelmed by the power of Lulu’s character whose overriding interest dominates the film, as she’s not the typical protagonist, where her fate and the film’s outcome remain in doubt until the end.  When Bai Long finally does appear, he tells her he’s sold their baby to a wealthy Shanghai doctor.  Despite Sunny’s obvious affection for the boyfriend, his initial distrust turns to empathy for Lulu along the way, as she’s been bitterly damaged by the uncaring acts of Bai Long. 

Much of the film is shot in transit, reflecting an aspect of Chinese culture that is robustly thriving, as China has a very dynamic transportation system, as people are always on the move, seen on bicycles, motorbikes, scooters, taxi’s, busses, trains, and even on foot making their way through the crowded streets.  The film doesn’t shy away from the grim existence of China’s lower classes and the murky standing of those living in the margins, especially Sunny who is initially indignant at the thought of Lulu slumming into his world, finding her offensive, where he didn’t want to be caught in the crossfire of her troubles, but the two develop an uneasy truce, where their performances are especially revealing, emotive, yet subtle, as both are used to repressing what they feel, but this film provides a series of anguishing moments that nearly destroy the veneer of cordiality, as the world Lulu believes in simply collapses around her, where others might be consumed by grief and disappointment, but Lulu perseveres.  Initially shot with wider shots, the farther along her journey, the closer the camera comes to her, eventually shooting in near close-up.  The brooding tone is given an atmospheric musical score by Patrick Jonsson that only enhances the oppressive climate, sweltering atmosphere, and changing emotional dynamic.  Still intent on finding her baby, she tracks the doctor to his home and knocks on the door, where the audience hasn’t a clue what to expect, eventually meeting the doctor’s wife in her upscale home, who was informed in the adoptive process that the mother was dead.  Like a horror film, both are confronted by a shifting reality that changes before their eyes, where Lulu, much like the mother in Jia Zhang-ke’s 2015 Top Ten List #2 Mountains May Depart (Shan he gu ren) , must decide on the spot whether a working class mother’s biological influence or the comfort of her son being raised by a wealthy family with more financial opportunities would be the best option, as if class distinction could lead to a better life.  It’s a heartbreaking moment that shows on her face, as it completely alters the single-minded purpose that drove her there in such a fury, leaving her vulnerable and wavering, caught completely off-guard.  Given the overall bleakness of the story, Sunny reveals himself to be sympathetic, offering unconditional support for Lulu through the final showdown, allowing the gay community to come out of the shadows, where marginalized single mothers and poor outcasts from the LGBT community are seen in a more compassionate light, spreading some degree of social awareness to groups that are traditionally isolated from the Chinese mainstream and viewed somewhat anonymously.  With a tightly oppressive feel throughout, literally twisting characters into emotional knots, it’s an open question whether the murky outcome finally relieves any of that built-up tension. 

2013 Top Ten List #3 A Touch of Sin (Tian zhu ding)

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.