Saturday Fiction (Lan xin da Ju yuan)

 

Director Lou Ye

Lou Ye and Gong Li

Gong Li

Mark Chao, Lou Ye, and Gong Li

Lou Ye, Gong Li, and Pascal Greggory

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SATURDAY FICTION (Lan xin da Ju yuan)                       B+                                            China  (126 mi)  2019  d: Lou Ye

So mysterious, so full of secrets.

Lies!  Deceit!  Murder!  Betrayal!  Espionage!  What’s not to like about this murky and shadowy presentation of Shanghai in the lead-up to the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, specifically Shanghai’s “Isolated Island” period, with relatively neutral sanctuary corridors divided into an International Settlement and a French Concession, completely surrounded by Japanese-occupied territory following their 1937 invasion (Second Sino-Japanese War).  This film is drenched in tense mood and noirish atmosphere, appropriating the past with a contemporary sense, where nothing is as it appears, instead it’s a puzzle piece world of spies and counter spies, as China has become a treacherous wartime intelligence battlefield of camouflage and deceit for both the Allies and Axis Powers.  Taking three years to be screened in the United States after it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, seemingly lost in the pandemic, Ma Yingli’s screenplay is based on the novels Death of Shanghai by British-Chinese writer Hong Ying and Shanghai by Japanese writer Yokomitsu Riichi, creating a lurid picture of a city in flux that tries to present itself as going through normal activities, but underneath there’s a nefarious plan afoot to radically extend the theater of war into the Pacific, where the element of surprise is of utmost secrecy, a matter of national security, where lives are viewed as expendable in order to carry out this devious plan.  That is the backdrop for the return of iconic actress Jean Yu (Gong Li, once the darling of Chinese films in the 80’s and 90’s, best known for her creative-romantic relationship with Zhang Yimou in 8 films, or fellow Guangxi Film Studio graduate Chen Kaige in 3 films, providing yet another spellbinding performance) to Shanghai after an absence of many years, ostensibly to appear in the play Saturday Fiction directed by her former lover Tan Na (Mark Chao), who also plays the lead male role in the play, while the theatrical character resembles Marlene Dietrich, seen smoking while dressed like a man, wearing suspenders attached to trousers, featuring a dancing scene fueled by American jazz music that erupts into pure chaos on multiple occasions as reality intrudes, serving to remind audiences of the boundary between cinematic space and the real.  With captions counting down each day of the week of December 1, 1941, her Mata Hari-like goals are to free her ex-husband in prison (Zhang Songwen) and steal the shocking secret of the Japanese, dividing her time between the Lyceum theater and the luxurious Cathay Hotel in the French district (renamed the Peace Hotel after the war), which is entrenched in a hall of mirrors atmosphere, reflecting the paranoia and surveillance inherent in the setting, where every character in the hotel is hiding something, and no one can be fully trusted.  Somewhere in between she is accosted on the street by Bai Mei (Huang Xiangli), an aspiring actress, magazine reporter, and obsessed fan who has memorized all her lines in an attempt to ingratiate herself, craving to be allowed access to the rehearsals, and while viewed suspiciously, most likely a Nationalist (KMT) government agent with her own motives, whose leadership is simultaneously fending off a second front with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) while fighting Japan, Jean Yu thinks she may be of some service due to the extreme difficulties of her tasks at hand, becoming essentially a living double in a relationship based on mutual exploitation.

This film is not presented in a conventional narrative style, but feels essentially abstract in nature, blurring the boundary between fiction and reality, with no musical score, shot in black and white by Zeng Jian, often with a shaky handheld camera, mostly in a darkened palette where humans are little more than shadows moving in the night, yet even in this subdued manner, Gong Li shines, as always, where something is driving her, bottled-up deep inside, yet her character remains as opaque as the film itself, like a hard-to-crack enigma.  “That woman is too mysterious,” a man says of her, “She’s like a box of secrets,” though near the end she ends up with a gun in her hand, fending off intruders, which is a completely different side of her, like seeing a gun-toting Ingrid Bergman in Ingrid Bergman Tribute: Casablanca (1942).  Existing somewhere between Lou Ye’s Tiananmen Square epic historical drama SUMMER PALACE (2006), which was banned in China, officially censoring the filmmaker for five years, and Ang Lee’s erotic WWII Shanghai spy thriller, Lust, Caution (Se, jie) (2007), this is a film built around international political intrigue, where swirling in the air are matters of extreme urgency, with a variety of languages spoken, including Mandarin, English, French, German, and Japanese, as characters come and go, often incoherently, creating an uncertain and suspended atmosphere, while at the same time recalling the complex historical moment that is the backdrop to the events of the film, yet what’s never in question is the infamous timeframe of the Pearl Harbor attack, or as President Roosevelt described it, “a date which will live in infamy.”  While that incident is never seen, it’s a precarious time in history, giving what we do see an undercurrent of gravity, as little is otherwise known about the dates that precede such a momentous moment in history, as that seems to be of special fascination for the director, where the people living in these times are completely unaware of what’s about to happen, instead they are simply living their lives as usual, following their daily routines and pursuing their goals, interweaving the destinies of different people during complex times, dividing time between the spaces of the theater and hotel, while also moving between on-stage and off-stage.  The film is entirely fictional, with a surprise twist at the end, where information is obtained through a mysterious use of hypnosis, with Jean Yu in yet another disguise, yet she refuses to pass along the information to her superiors, maintaining her allegiance to China, which needed outside military intervention to fend off the stranglehold of the Japanese military occupation.  What’s never in doubt is the star status of actress Gong Li, who is catered to like an international star, yet underneath the surface, with its myriad of changing characters, it’s hard to get a read, even between good and evil, as there are so many artificial façades, betrayals, mysteries, and enemies, where the only certainty is the deception in the air, with a supreme challenge of shooting on real locations, recreating the year 1941 in the heart of metropolitan Shanghai.  We are reminded that Stanley Kwan already made a love letter to the city of Shanghai in Everlasting Regret (Changhen ge) (2005), also shooting on real locations in contemporary times, but due to the rapidly modernized face of the city, most of the only remaining preserved historical sites were indoors.

What prevents this from being more greatly appreciated is the meandering style, where the fragmented editing can be jarring, subversively using a combination of long takes and jump cuts, mirroring the past and the present, freely moving between Jean Yu’s mysterious stage performance and her own dealings as a saboteur, as the secrets she holds are matched by the theatrical secrets she plays on stage, yet what’s remarkable is that the director always concerns himself with the contemporary post-socialist society in which he lives, offering a veiled critique underneath the historical theatricality.  According to the director notes, Lou has made a film “about the destinies of different people during a time of complex world crisis,” which speaks to the present as much as the past.  From the beginning, theater, politics, and human relations appear linked under an artificialized idea of performance that makes it difficult to achieve truth, as theater and espionage are shown as equivalent worlds of fiction, yet the filmmaker continually provides Yu’s female eyewitness perspective (rare in male-dominated spy movies), elevating the level of ambiguity from reality and performance, as well as history and fiction, with the Japanese becoming increasing violent and aggressive, especially towards the Chinese, their sworn adversaries, with Japanese imperialist forces oppressing the seemingly peaceful neutral Isolated Island of Shanghai, unleashing sweeping attacks at specified targets.  At the center is General Furuyama (Joe Odagiri), a target of the film’s spy operations, who is a bit of a blank slate, despite efforts to flesh out his character with a tragic backstory, yet extracting vital military communication codes from such a high ranking intelligence officer appears to be Yu’s real agenda, assisted by fellow Allied agent Saul Speyer (Tom Wlaschiha), disguised in the role of the Cathay Hotel’s manager as he welcomes Yu into the premises away from the prying eyes of paparazzi.  She is acting under the orders of French spymaster Frédéric Hubert (Pascal Greggory), who supervises Yu in her various missions, yet her intentions are anything but clear.  Constantly circling back to Tan Na’s theatrical production of Saturday Fiction, continually moving back and forth, intermingling the different perspectives, we are reminded that she remain as mysterious and inscrutable as possible, emphasizing that she is “unknowable,” a “woman of mystery,” always wondering what role she is playing now.  But once the wheels are set in motion, all hell breaks loose, feeling more like a noir-drenched dreamscape than any existing reality, as there are some beautifully staged, rain-drenched atmospheric moments, yet they are transformed into a John Woo-like hail of bullets, where it’s odd to see this much gunfire in an art film, though seeing Gong Li with a gun in her hand recalls the famous Jean-Luc Godard dictum, “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,” highlighting his belief that cinema requires only two core elements, sex and action, to create a compelling, audience-grabbing story.  Often associated with his French New Wave style, the premise suggests that complex plots are secondary to strong visual dynamics.  There’s a Nietzsche quote referenced in the film from Beyond Good and Evil, “Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love,” accentuating themes of obsession and theatricality, while also blurring the lines between reality and performance in this spy thriller, yet other than Li’s character, and the various transformations she undergoes, nothing is individualized, instead there’s an everchanging fatalistic landscape of deceit and betrayal as the dominoes start falling, erupting in a shocking amount of blood and violence.   

Note

The titular Saturday Fiction, also known as Libailiu, was a popular and highly influential literary magazine in China from 1912 to 1949, which flourished in Shanghai, largely consisting of serialized novels that focused on entertainment, romance, and scandal, targeting the urban middle class with recreational, rather than political or educational, purposes, explaining in its inaugural issue, “On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, everyone is engaged in their professions; only on Saturday and Sunday do they have leisure time to read novels.”  At the time this film takes place, it had temporarily ceased publication during wartime, already long forgotten, dismissed as escapist, reactionary, and decadent, becoming a footnote in history, with filmmaker Lou Ye reviving its memory by utilizing it in an intricate play-within-a-play structure.

2020 Top Ten List #4 I Wish I Knew (Hai shang chuan qi)

Director Jia Zhang-ke







 

 

I WISH I KNEW (Hai shang chuan qi)                   A-                                                          China  (119 mi)  2010  d:  Jia Zhang-ke

If you don’t care, why let me hope and pray so?
Don’t lead me on, if I’m a fool just say so.
Should I keep dreaming on, or just forget you?
What shall I do, I wish I knew.     

⸺Mack Gordon and Harry Warren, from Diamond Horseshoe, 1945, Betty Grable - 'I wish I knew' (2:06)                

Premiering at Un Certain Regard at Cannes ten years ago but never released here, this film has a belated distribution with a slightly shorter edit, an extremely poetic time capsule made in coordination with the upcoming 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, commissioned by the Expo’s planners, as Jia explores and re-evaluates Shanghai’s identity as transnational, unstable and in constant flux, drawing a connection between the historical and contemporary setting, inquiring about the history of the city by speaking to older, influential people whose lives were shaped there, heard describing their family memories, revealing how the city affected their often shattered lives, delivering a personal meditation on China’s recent past.  Initially interviewing over 80 people, it is cut down to only 18, very rich in detail, with the same sense of urgency as Jia’s majestic film STILL LIFE (2006), using an elder generation for historical purposes, as they lived in an Old Shanghai that no longer exists, having transitioned to a modern global city, yet an essential component of the film is capturing their memories before they fade away, as their personal testimony is as revealing as it is riveting, providing a collective living history that often deviates from official accounts, describing an era of assassination and revolution, pitting Chinese against one another in a civil war, where the military leaders were familiar with one another, having attended the same military schools, now divided strictly on political grounds, where the cost of Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists was enormous, resulting in a fractured nation and constantly changing Chinese identities.  Perhaps the most revealing were open discussions about the impact of the Cultural Revolution, where the city was a stronghold of radical leftism, requiring mandatory confessions on what was perceived as counter-revolutionary activity, which included family migrations to Taiwan and Hong Kong, often for safety purposes to avoid arrests and political persecution, but these visits had negative repercussions long afterwards, as the state was interested in the reasons for leaving Shanghai.  Using clips from older films, while speaking to artists associated with those films, Jia cleverly interweaves images of past and present-day Shanghai, suggesting the thriving film industries in Taiwan and Hong Kong were nurtured by Shanghai refugees who fled the mainland during the Communist takeover.  Omitted, however, are the films of Stanley Kwan, a Hong Kong director whose historical pieces set in Shanghai are legendary, Center Stage (Yuen Ling-yuk) (1991), Red Rose, White Rose (Hong mei gui bai mei gui) (1994), or Everlasting Regret (Changhen ge) (2005), where the latter film is set through different historical periods spanning some fifty years from the 30’s to the 80’s, and is as much a love story to the city of Shanghai as to the people whose lives passed through there, where the roving eye of the camera curiously becomes an unseen character.  In much the same manner, Jia links his connecting pieces with an anonymous character portrayed by his wife, Zhao Tao, who never speaks, dressed all in white, walking through the contemporary city as an eye witness, sailing through the seemingly interchangeable straits of both Hong Kong and Shanghai, gazing upon the futuristic architecture or the muddied Expo construction site filled with workers in hard hats, where streets still under construction reveal demolished buildings, vacated lots, and newly renovated neighborhoods, with Zhao soaking it all in, mirroring the perception of viewers watching and evaluating this film. 

Early on, a woman tells the story of her Communist father’s execution at the age of 24, ordered by Chiang Kai-shek just before Shanghai was liberated, now a little known revolutionary martyr, an event that happened shortly before her birth, recorded by a Hong Kong journalist in black and white photos, where the last image moments before execution is described as a brave revolutionary with a fearless smile.  “I only know my father through these images,” she tearfully reveals, recalling that her mother went a little crazy afterwards, running alongside the Communist troops when they entered the city in 1949 still searching for her dead husband, much like the wives and girlfriends of lost or missing German soldiers greeting each incoming train to Berlin in Fassbinder’s THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (1978).  This personal recollection of family heartbreak is contrasted by propaganda images from the Wang Bing film TO LIBERATE SHANGHAI (1959), featuring deliriously happy crowds greeting victorious Communist soldiers, red flags waving, with an officer proudly declaring, “The liberation of Shanghai marks the complete smashing of imperialist forces in China!”  In accordance with the revolutionary fervor, Jia speaks to textile worker Huang Baomei, who recalls being called into an ordinary factory plant meeting and being floored to see none other than Chairman Mao Zedong present, congratulating her on her profession, as the nation was relying on her for clothing, becoming one of the “model workers” in a 1958 film by Xie Jin where she plays herself in a film named after her, becoming the face of the Great Leap Forward, emblematic of a patriotic Socialist working class heroine and a household name in Mao’s China (occurring simultaneously to the great famine when millions starved to death), spending decades in the same factory, now seen shut down and empty (with songs of union solidarity faintly heard offscreen), an abandoned relic of what it once was.  Wang Toon, director of the Taiwanese film RED PERSIMMON (1966), reflects on his childhood recollections of fleeing Shanghai as the Communists closed in on the city, where the chaos surrounding a departing ship to Taiwan was so severe his grandmother had to tie together ten children to prevent them from being lost in the swelling crowd.  Other elderly Shanghai residents stranded in Taipei since 1949 are interviewed as well, offering their experiences, including legendary Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, interviewed on a train crossing through the mountains, recalling similar imagery from Dust in the Wind (Lian lian feng chen) (1986) while also showing brief moments from the luminous introductory scene from Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua) (1998), where he expressed great curiosity about returning to the city to shoot the film, describing how prominent arranged marriages have been throughout Chinese history, with little concept of love, yet was excited at the prospects of opening up 20th century floodgates for romance, also showing clips from Hong Kong director but Shanghai-born Wong Kar-wai’s DAYS OF BEING WILD (1990), where actress Rebecca Pan plays an aging Shanghai refugee.  Speaking to the director, Ms. Pan is herself the daughter of a Shanghai woman who fled to Hong Kong in 1949, choking back tears as she describes her mother’s plight, seen singing bits of a song she recalls, perhaps the title song of the film.  It’s curious how these other cities of Taipei and Hong Kong play a part in Shanghai’s legendary history, but Jia’s film does a formidable job connecting them all to one another, as that’s something not seen in other films with this degree of complexity.  According to film historian Tony Rayns (Currency | I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhangke. China) - Cinema Scope, who provided the English subtitling for the film, “these Taiwanese voices have never been heard in Mainland China before.”  

Wei Wei, the heroine in Fei Mu’s SPRING IN A SMALL TOWN (1948), describes the dismissive hostility on display from the city while shooting the film, eventually fleeing to Hong Kong afterwards, while the director’s daughter, Fei Mingyi, also describes how political unrest was so severe that the family also fled to Hong Kong, believing at the time it was only temporary, but the situation altered drastically, as Fei Mu’s reputation was ruined, vilified by the Communist Party, dying in exile only a few years later in 1951.  The film was ultimately banned for many years in China, but over time is now considered one of the greatest Chinese films ever made, voted # 2 in a 2019 poll conducted by Time Out Shanghai, The 100 best Mainland Chinese films - Time Out Shanghai.  When Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni came to China during the Cultural Revolution in 1972 to make a documentary film CHUNG KUO – CINA (1972) about China at the invitation of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, he was welcomed with open arms to make a 4-hour film that Western viewers found sympathetic, where we hear the story from a Shanghai TV journalist that accompanied him around the city, surprised by what he felt were “backwards” images, believing it was not featuring the positive aspects of China’s resurgence.  When the film was released, providing a somewhat detached, neo-realist view of daily life (as is Antonioni’s style), it was instantly denounced in the People’s Daily, claiming Antonioni had “evil intentions,” labeled a counter-revolutionary, claiming he had defamed the image of a new China, setting off nationwide criticism (Repudiating Antonioni's Anti-China Film), officially banned by the Gang of Four, not shown in China until a 2004 screening at the Beijing Cinema Institute, and roundly condemned by people who never saw the film, including the journalist who was himself punished, losing two years of his life suffering his own political persecution, forced to attend self-criticism sessions.  Of note, China offered a public apology to the filmmaker in 1980.  Ironically, this Jia film received much of the same criticism in China, claiming it didn’t capture the boldness of the city’s colors, but much of that can be attributed to his use of a digital camera, lighter, and easily transportable, making it easier to move around with ease.  The film supposedly lacks contextualization, according to the critics, as there are no archival photos of Old Shanghai, and the director fails to provide revolutionary sentiment.  Largely overlooked at the time of its release, what critics failed to comprehend was the depth of humanism provided by those interviewed, as it’s their life stories onscreen that vividly encapsulate distinct moments in Chinese history, providing a tragic and sorrowful assessment of what it was like to live during historical times, describing the ordeals of parents and grandparents as told by the family survivors, where oral history is akin to Vertov’s symphony of voices, finding universal themes of displacement, lives uprooted, families split apart, providing innovative editing techniques showing a city under massive construction, but also under the influence of Hong Kong and the nation of Taiwan, revealing how they are all interconnected, as an ancient city is transformed into a modern metropolis seemingly overnight, revealing a natural progression from then until now, with younger people featured more towards the end.  The continual presence of Zhao Tao onscreen is significant, giving voice to the voiceless, a bystander on the threshold of history, becoming a stand-in for all the citizens of Shanghai, as it’s not just about those 18 voices.  Jia’s film construction is a composite of many forces working together, showing great insight in challenging the official explanation of history which has been appropriated by the Communist Party, with evocative music by Lim Giong, becoming an impressionistic mosaic of art and journalism, uniquely allowing viewers to make up their own minds about the human toll exacted by progress.