Crosscurrent (長江圖, Chang jiang tu)

Writer/director Yang Chao

CROSSCURRENT (長江圖, Chang jiang tu)                       A-                                              China  (116 mi)  2016  ‘Scope  d:  Yang Chao

Time, like a river, flows both day and night.

A moody, atmospheric, yet breathtakingly beautiful film shot on 35mm (among the last of the Chinese films shot on celluloid) in ‘Scope by Mark Lee Ping-Bing, who also shot Hou Hsiao-hsien’s utterly enthralling 2015 Top Ten List #9 The Assassin (Nie Yinniang), with Hou developing a lifelong collaboration with the cinematographer which began with A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Tong nien wang shi) (1985), while also recognized for sharing shooting duties with Christopher Doyle on Wong Kar-wai’s IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000).  With little narrative to speak of, the film is largely a meditative tone poem of a lengthy 1200 mile river journey from the mouth of the Yangtze River in Shanghai, the third longest river in the world, and the longest to flow entirely within one country, traveling all the way to Yibin where the river meets the Min River.  A contrast of modernity and tradition, nature and technology, enhanced by spectacular visual poetry, the river is given a mythical context from the outset, interspersed with passages from poems identifiable by the towns where they were written, much like Bi Gan’s 2016 Top Ten List #2 Kaili Blues (Lu bian ye can) (2015), reflecting a Buddhist interchangeability in all things, where Gao Chun (Qin Hao) loses his father, inheriting the captaincy of a rusty river barge, a cargo transport vehicle, yet we are told his father’s soul will never be at peace until a black fish caught in the river by his son is placed in an incense bowl, unfed, and dies a natural death.  While at anchor in Shanghai harbor, Chun spots a beguiling young woman on another boat, An Lu (Xin Zhilei), but departs before he has a chance to speak to her.  While attempting to repair an auxiliary motor, he discovers an old handwritten collection of poems (all written by the director) from an earlier time entitled Map of the Yangtze River, which is the Chinese film title, a diary written by a previous deckhand describing his thoughts about the river and a mysterious young woman, conveying a vague sense of loss.  As he travels further along the river, following the same journey as the author of the poems, he reads passages from the book, growing more obsessed with the young woman that he continually finds waiting for him along the way, developing a sexual rapport, yet she remains elusive, until it is impossible to distinguish fiction from reality, as they all blend into one, using a magical realist style that resembles a dream language of the river.  The sound design is equally remarkable, with a constant sound of motors on the water, where there is a heightened sensory experience, shot in the dead of winter where characters are always wearing heavy coats with scarfs, where you can see their breath in the cold.  Like some kind of River Styx, transporting souls from the living to the underworld, the river seems to possess supernatural powers, with the river captain attempting to navigate his own path, yet the life of the river, given this unfathomable context, becomes vibrant and mysteriously alive, where the ravishing beauty in this enveloping universe is simply indescribable. 

Winner of a Silver Bear at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival for Outstanding Artistic Contribution for the cinematography, the aesthetic superlatives are mind-boggling, as are the multi-layered sound effects, creating an orchestrated cacophony of sounds at sea that become quite sophisticated, allowing viewers an existential view of the river passage, largely wordless with poetic incantations, where you’re able to disappear into someone else’s identity while blending into the majestic landscape, like air, land, and water having a symbiotic relationship with each other.  Much of it shot at night, the use of a searchlight or fire onshore in the mountains brilliantly illuminates a living spirit that feeds the void of emptiness.  At some point they pick up a mysterious cargo, demanding extra payment for the danger incurred, but the contents are never revealed, yet this adds a layer of suspense.  Uncle Xiang (Jiang Hualin), the ship’s mechanic who worked for Chun’s late father, and a younger deckhand Wu Sheng (Wu Lipeng) are the only others onboard, yet they rarely engage one another in conversation, adding to the silent mystery.  Due to a lack of a coherent story, many viewers may be perplexed and baffled by the pervasive emptiness of content, meandering, seemingly going nowhere, where they may find themselves lost in a netherworld with no way out, with many viewers finding it hollow and overly pretentious.  With films like this, the poem translations are a key element, as they may leave many hanging in a world of incoherence, struggling to find meaning or purpose, finding it incomprehensible.  But don’t believe the critics, whose contempt for this film basically killed its chances of international distribution, screening at the Chicago International Film Festival in 2016 where it sold out, but was never shown anywhere else after that except New York and Los Angeles.  This is a film to watch and make up your own mind, as it defies convenient categorization, but it’s challenging, somewhat abstract, yet ultimately a highly rewarding experience.  All films need not be explained, which is actually a refreshing and invigorating touch, allowing viewers themselves to navigate the murky waters of such a languorous, dreamlike journey, open to multiple interpretations, a blank slate filled with symbolism and recurring images, where a life on the water is its own mystical experience, yet it feels as much like an investigation into the mystery of the human soul.  At one point Chun can hear, but not see An Lu speaking to a monk in a Buddhist pagoda, asking spiritual questions, yet he feels trapped on another floor, like being caught in a labyrinth, with sound his only sensory connection.  By the time he finds his way to the monk she has disappeared.  The director continually drops little hints, like pieces of a puzzle, that when strung together reveal a larger whole, yet through most of the film Chun feels distant, melancholy, and lost, disconnected from the whole, in search of the perpetually missing piece.  As they move from town to town, they are identified by name onscreen, like chapter headings, where there is also an indicator of the number of days on the journey, the last being the 98th day.  

An Wei writes musical passages for the film, dark and melancholic, with lonely cello-infused music by David Darling (who just died recently in January 2021) from his Dark Wood album added as well, David Darling - Darkwood - 1995 on Vimeo YouTube (44:36), offering lyrical depth underneath the lush visual palette.  Passing through relocated villages, Chun eventually makes a grueling two-day passage through the Three Gorges Dam, a gigantic hydro-electric project where homes have been meticulously and tirelessly relocated brick by brick to higher locations, each one numbered, as otherwise they will forever be submerged underwater after the dam’s completion, requiring a massive displacement of 1.3 million people to new locations, where a town literally disappears only to reappear elsewhere.  Perhaps the most ominous moment occurs at the Three Gorges Dam, with the barge engulfed in one of the locks that suddenly fills with water, yet the grating mechanical sounds of the large gate opening could just as easily be the gates of Hell, yet suddenly a whole new world opens.  The farther along the journey the more vague and mystifying it becomes, like a Heart of Darkness journey, growing even more contemplative with an interior focus, at one point growing surreal.  An Lu is seen along the way in different incarnations, continually disappearing only to reappear again, always recognizable, like an elusive object of desire, eventually existing only in his own mind, which is where she may have always been, as who or what she is has always remained obscure.  A hint may come early on when she throws herself into the water, an apparent suicide attempt, but afterwards we see a miraculous swimmer who seems unfazed by traveling great distances, where she assumes supernatural powers.  After a heated argument Wu Sheng falls overboard, with no sign or trace of him, but the next morning An Lu suddenly reappears out of the water, possibly capable of disappearing into someone else’s identity, which matches a parable told in one of the poems, a ghost story of a girl who crept into the body of a merchant, again reflecting an interchangeability in spirits.  Uncle Xiang is plagued by the journey’s bad omens, leaving a note that he has left without explanation, jettisoning the illegal cargo.  Arriving in Yibin with no cargo, the shady business partner has sent someone to stab Chun, laying collapsed and bleeding, where he sees An Lu’s face underwater, like a river nymph, smiling, yet remaining submerged in the water.  Surviving the attack, he makes his way into Tibet’s Chumar River, another 1300 miles to the northern headwater of the Yangtze, which flows from the disappearing Jianggendiru Glacier, the southwest side of Geladandong Peak in the Tanggula Mountains.  In this vast Tibetan Plateau, he finds an isolated gravestone of An Lu’s mother, guarded apparently by her religiously devout father who abandoned both of them to follow his own spiritual path, making this feel more like a religious pilgrimage, followed by early archival footage of the Yangtze River, including flimsy vessels attempting to navigate their way through a ferocious current before turning into a major thoroughway for shipping traffic.  In a final image, as religious statues can be seen overlooking the river, An Lu has taken her place among them.

Soul On a String

SOUL ON A STRING           C                   

China  (142 mi)  2016  d:  Zhang Yang

Following on the heels of the Russian revisionist film Paradise (Rai) (2016), this is another example of a nation literally appropriating another country’s language, land, and culture in an attempt to alter the world’s perception of China, which is the occupying force in Tibet.  Imagine the Nazi’s making a fantasy film in French about Paris during their WWII occupation, Israel making a mythical film in Arabic about the Palestinians during their armed occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, or Britain making a film in Gaelic about the Northern Irish while under British military rule in the 70’s.  A visually stunning film like this, with its panoramic vistas, has a way of elevating one’s appreciation for the ravishing beauty we see onscreen, but completely leaves out any background historical context.  Mao Zedong’s Communist Nationalist army took over Tibet in 1950, hailing the act as a liberation from an old, feudal system that included both British and American imperialist influence.  Resentment for the Chinese grew in Tibet over the following decade with armed rebellions breaking out.  In March 1959 the capital of Lhasa erupted in a full-blown revolt, where asserting Chinese nationalism, anywhere from 200,000 to a million Tibetans were killed and approximately 6000 Buddhist monasteries were ransacked and destroyed, forcing the Dalai Lama, the widely revered Tibetan spiritual leader, to flee to India, where he has lived in exile ever since.  China’s assertion for its territorial claim goes back to the 13th century, when both Tibet and China were absorbed into the Mongol empire.  Known as The Great Khanate, the empire contained China, Tibet, and most of East Asia, becoming known as China’s Yuan Dynasty.  Throughout the Yuan, and subsequent Ming and Qing dynasties, Tibet remained a subordinate principality of China, though it retained varying degrees of independence.  The Himalayan mountain range provides a mountainous wall of strategic security for China, while Tibet possesses a significant mining industry, also serving as a primary water supplier.  China has invested billions into Tibet and flooded the nation with Chinese immigrants over the past decade where its resources have been included in the economic development plan for Western China known as China Western Development.  Like the former satellite nations of the USSR, all answering to Moscow, the needs of Tibetans, who are devout Buddhists, residing in an economic zone described as a Tibet Autonomous Region, now answer to Beijing, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party and are under constant threat by overzealous security forces.  This conflict of limitless spirituality and occupying military rule has resulted in the self-immolation of more than 140 Buddhist monks in protest of Chinese rule in Tibet since 2009, as documented by Tsering Woeser, a well-known Tibetan writer and activist, Why Are Tibetans Setting Themselves on Fire? | by Tsering Woeser ..., which includes passages from Tsering Woeser’s Tibet on Fire: Self-Immolations Against Chinese Rule, from The New York Review of Books, January 11, 2016. 

That being said, one must be extremely suspect of how China appropriates Tibetan culture, as it is just another form of political exploitation.  In the not too distant past, China outlawed filming in Tibet, where actress Joan Chen defied Chinese censors by shooting there in her directing debut film XIU XIU:  THE SENT-DOWN GIRL (Tian yu) (1998), an overt condemnation of the Cultural Revolution and winner of seven awards at the Taiwanese Golden Horse Film Festival.  While there are current Tibetan filmmakers, such as Pema Tseden’s THARLO (2015) or Sonthar Gyal’s RIVER (2015), who provide an authentic view of life in modern Tibet, the rest of the world remains cultural outsiders.  Films about ethnic minorities, and in particular films about Tibet, are subject to special scrutiny in China, where anything filmed in Tibet requires approval by the Tibet Committee of the United Front Work Department which operates under the Communist Party’s Central Committee — not just the state media regulator, as is the case with most films.  According to Shelly Kraicer, Toronto film critic and scholar of Chinese cinema, “At the end of the day, everybody is still using and exploiting images of Tibet.”  Director Zhang Yang previously directed overly commercial works like SHOWER (1999) and SUNFLOWER (2005), but before making this film he decided to spend a few months living in Tibet in 2013, where some of his experience is captured in the documentary PATHS OF THE SOUL (2015), which follows the Werner Herzog template established in WHEEL OF TIME (2003).  While Herzog and his crew travel to a Buddhist pilgrimage site in Bodgaya, India, Zhang, in a part documentary and part fiction film, follows the journey of a group of Tibetan Buddhists on a pilgrimage to Lhasa, the holy capital of Tibet, much of it reflected in continuous repetition of prostrating one’s self on the ground.  Zhang’s new film, where all of the actors in the film are Tibetan and speak Tibetan, is based on a story by the prominent Tibetan writer Tashi Dawa, drawing on Tibetan folk traditions and magical realist elements as it follows the adventurous exploits of a man named Tabei (Tibetan actor Kimba) who is brought back to life by a living Buddha after being killed by lightning, offering him penance to cleanse his murderous past and a chance for rebirth.  The film follows his elongated and roundabout journey, including a collection of eccentrics he encounters along the way, as he pursues a mission to bring a Dzi bead, or sacred stone, to a mythical holy land. Using a comical, over exaggerated Sergio Leone spaghetti western style, the film continues to view Tibet as a fairy tale land of fantasy and exoticism, leaving out any references to ethnic abuse or signs of a culture repressed, as thousands of Tibetans are being forced to leave their grazing land and an agrarian way of life that is centuries old, replaced by Chinese bulldozers and more widespread pollution, with fear gripping an occupied community, not to mention arbitrary arrests and brutal detentions that continue without due process under Chinese communist rule, including torture and shoot-to-kill policies in effect, many for something so commonplace as flying the banned Tibetan Snow Lion flag. 

The film is the exact opposite of that grim reality, painting a picture of staggering opulence, like a reworking of Wong Kar-wai’s visually luxurious ASHES OF TIME (1994), blending Buddhism with Western motifs, set in endlessly vast desert landscapes, all captured in widescreen by cinematographer Guo Daming, featuring sweeping aerial shots, Soul on a String by ZHANG Yang - Trailer - YouTube (1:58).  At two and a half hours, this overlong yet epic journey of mythological self-discovery combines two of Dawa’s best-known short stories from the 80’s, Tibet, a Soul Knotted on a Leather Thong and On the Road to Lhasa, featuring a prologue, a shoot-out, a battle-hardened, resurrected criminal on a new mission, where he prefers to be a loner, but along comes a girl named Chung (Quni Ciren), who leaves her sheep and goats behind as she’s smitten by his strange appeal after a night in the same bed, remaining by his side throughout the journey, followed by Pu (Yizi Danzeng), a dwarfish and peculiarly mischievous mute with psychic powers.  Following them are two brothers, trigger happy Guori (Zerong Dages), seen in the opening shoot-out, and the more measured older brother Kodi (Lei Chen), as both vow to kill Tabei to avenge the killing of their father.  However Guori has a habit of killing a rotating cast of companions named Tabei, leaving behind a trail of wrongful men named Tabei whose killings had nothing to do with the crime, which eventually start to weigh on his karmic consciousness.  Also following him are Gedan (Siano Dudiom Zahi), a mysterious stalker who seems to be recording the events on paper and may be the narrator, and Zandui (Solange Nima), a lone wanderer with a goofy dog named General.  Many of the secondary characters provide comic relief, growing more ridiculous over time, where all are one-dimensional characterizations, while the film, as resplendent as it may be, is little more than escapist entertainment, featuring swordfights and honor codes that play out in western lore, set against a backdrop of awesome visual splendor.  It’s something of a confused curiosity where recurring characters randomly cross paths, reaching for a strain of pop mysticism, with the title referring to the leather string that Tabei wears around his neck that holds the stone, as well as Chung’s habit of counting the days of her romance by tying knots on a leather cord, where both, according to Buddhist teachings, need to free themselves of all earthly burdens and attachments.  But that being said, while it’s immaculately gorgeous, there’s really no successful resolution by the end, as the journey simply ends.  This may remind some of Tarsem’s THE FALL (2006), a visually extravagant film shot in twenty-five different countries over the course of four years, which is equally breathtaking to look at, but it does a better job of conjuring up images from a 5-year old’s imagination, taking a kaleidoscopic trip literally around the world, extending the limits of storytelling, and doing a better job of blending fantasy and reality, ultimately becoming a much more intimate and rewarding experience.