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.

A History of Violence

 

Director David Cronenberg on the set

Cronenberg with Viggo Mortensen

Cronenberg with Mortensen and Monica Bello

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE                      A-                                                                             USA  Germany  (96 mi)  2005  d: David Cronenberg

This might be a good time to re-examine an earlier work of Viggo Mortensen in this David Cronenberg film.  One of the most versatile directors working in cinema today, pioneering the body horror sub-genre into the mainstream, finding subtext in the strangest places in order to uncover our true nature, typically depicted with a pronounced visual flair, earning a great deal of commercial success while exploring deeply unsettling philosophical ramifications.  His first Hollywood studio feature since the 1980’s, adapted from an obscure graphic novel, this may be the most mainstream film of his career, yet also one of the most subversive, both celebrating and deconstructing the American Dream.  The film was almost universally praised, listed as the #1 best film of the year by Amy Taubin from The Village Voice, Amy Taubin: 1987-2005 and J. Hoberman from The Village Voice in 2005, #2 by Cahiers du Cinéma magazine in 2005, and #3 by Jonathan Rosenbaum in 2005.  The Village Voice’s annual poll by critics and film writers named it the best picture of 2005 by the widest margin in their history, joining a long list of cutting edge directors who previously claimed this distinction, Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999), David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001), Todd Haynes’ FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002), Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), and Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset (2004), with Cronenberg also named best director in the same poll, suggesting the film is part of the pervasive American culture.  Set in a small, predominantly rural, all-white community in Indiana, part of America’s heartland, which suggests an idyllic existence, or a place out of time, a town of “nice people,” according to the sheriff, but part of a delusional portrait of an idealized America, where the opening sequence exemplifies the director’s command of the medium, a masterful long shot that is all mood with a precise malevolent tone, including outrageous shades of dark humor, as Cronenberg does with this film what Eastwood failed to do in MYSTIC RIVER (2003), which is to establish, at the core of this film, believability.  A mix of postmodern sensibilities and arthouse aspirations, the film successfully straddles the line between a thriller and an art film, where it’s intriguing how Cronenberg wordlessly connects between characters as well as the audience, using complex layers that make it difficult to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil, as many of the evil characters never cross the line of out and out criminal behavior, while many of the righteous and good characters do cross that line, yet for understandable motives.  The question is whether the lead protagonist can renounce violence and forge a new identity, with the film hinting he cannot, as his violent past comes back to haunt the present, reverting to his old ways to save and protect his family, where the primitive violence is very intimate and physical, with the viewing audience becoming complicit in the violence as well, as we identify with the emotional turmoil the characters’ face, which necessitates a kind of moral accounting for that desire for violence, becoming a snapshot of America coming of age in the shadows of violence, with Cronenberg holding a mirror up to society.  They appear to resemble the crises of ordinary people, especially as the attackers are so evil and callous, so we have to accept the consequences, though there are also indications that he has finally cleansed himself of that violence in order to be integrated back into his family, expressed through a family dinner scene, as he’s invited to rejoin the family for a classic Midwestern meal of meatloaf and mashed potatoes.  

With bad guys on the loose, almost in the abstract, the film changes gears and zeroes in on a typical loving family somewhere in small-town Indiana, where Tom, Viggo Mortensen, an aw-shucks everyday kind of guy who runs a Main Street diner, with Monica Bello as Edie, his loving and supportive wife, with two kids, a befuddled teenage boy Jack (Ashton Holmes) who is the victim of a high school bully in a letter jacket and what looks like a cute but over-pampered blond, curly-haired, 6-year old daughter Sarah (Heidi Hayes).  In this film there are no bizarre locales, and no over-stylizations, but it does express violence as an organic phenomenon, drawing on the Western and the gangster genres in order to achieve new levels of consciousness.  The rhythm of life is established and broken when the bad guys enter the diner and get their lunch handed to them by soft-spoken, mild mannered Tom, a stand-in for Clark Kent, who saves the day and is instantly turned into a reluctant hero, where the shift from hero to vigilante happens in an instant, as does the shift from professional killer to American hero, in this case viewed as one and the same.  We are reminded that women and children everywhere live with men who are killers, as they live with men who were soldiers, who did what they had to do during wartime.  Living with killers is not a difficulty, but only becomes troubling when that killing is not sanctioned by a larger purpose.  Mortensen is an actor who can play large or small with equal skill.  Amid a growing sense of paranoia and fear, causing him to remark at one point, “I think I’m losing my mind,” a strange tale of double identity is unfolding.  On the surface, he appears to be an all-American family man, allowing Cronenberg to exploit prevalent themes that occur throughout much of his work, namely, the way things appear can be deceptive, and the idea that normal conventions we use in our everyday lives can be highly dubious.  The director engages in philosophical questions of order and disorder, which can be unclear, especially in the context of our uncertainty in the world around us, yet there’s something deeply unsettling in the way Cronenberg shows how notions of deception can be tied to our own identity.  With various forces of deception undercutting the prevailing reality, Cronenberg makes us question ideas we have about who we are.  Despite his undesired popularity, more bad guys arrive in the form of Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), who is missing one eye, and attributes its loss to Tom, who he recognizes as gangster Joey Cusack from the old neighborhood in Philly, a revelation that exposes the monstrosity of his former life which threatens the stability of his marriage when Edie discovers who he really is, where this violent past continues to pose a threat lurking over the present even after the film is over.  Harris stalks him, very much like the high school bully that continues to pick on the son, until all hell break loose in each case, where the situation is resolved through unintended violence, but it gets the job done.  Or does it?  As there’s more bad guys where they came from.  Violence only leads to more violence, which sometimes seems like the only way, as without it, innocent individuals would continue be victimized and harmed, so at the very least, we understand and are willing to accept its place in our society, all precipitated here by seething male anger. 

Interesting that Cronenberg establishes some healthy marital sex, even after twenty years of marriage, which adds credibility to the vulnerability of the characters.  We see them when no one is looking, and they maintain their interest and intellect.  There are extended scenes of morally questionable sex balanced against extreme violence and death.  The complexity of Monica Bello’s performance is stunning, bewildered at the enormity of his deceit, remaining fierce and independent, yet she’s nearly raped by her husband with rough sex on the stairs, who turns into a monster to defend his family.  Again, this borders on rape, though the sex is consensual, despite elements of force, where we see her back is badly bruised afterwards, prompting Tom to ask jokingly, “What have you done with my wife?”  Turning into something else entirely, this movie is about an outsider suppressing the more grotesque excesses of his bloody past to fit into mainstream American life, where this newfound knowledge of her husband’s violent past unleashes new behaviors and emotions in her, which may as well be a metaphor for the film – unintended consequences.  As Tom has to come to terms with Joey, and all the ramifications of his so-called controlled violence, so too does his family and his town, as they’re all interconnected.  Summoned back to Philadelphia by his crime boss brother, Richie Cusack (William Hurt), who bluntly acknowledges “You’re living the American dream.  You really bought into it, didn’t you?” yet it is also a day of reckoning, in the very worst way, forcing him to deal with it in the only language the criminal underworld understands, extreme violence, which is jarring to say the least, but he didn’t exactly have much of an alternative, becoming a very real and unavoidable part of human existence.  This violent side disrupts the idyllic harmony of small town life in America, where everything is safe and good, a stark contrast to the violent lifestyle in the cities, where the apparent tension is a factor throughout the film, with both sides imperceptibly blending into one another without our noticing, offering redemptive possibilities.  The nauseating acts of violence are brutal, but not gratuitous, establishing the world as a dangerous place, and is juxtaposed against the innocence of Tom’s daughter awaking from a horrible dream with shadow monsters, which is clearly meant to subvert the world established by the film.  There is a brilliant and elegant pace and style throughout, economical and spare, without a single wasted frame, using Howard Shore music that sounds like Aaron Copland in Our Town, pure understated small town Americana, prideful, even heroic, yet mourning a faraway loss or regret, a reminder that death is a fundamental fabric of small town life.  An essential question this film asks is whether a person is allowed forgiveness for an immoral past after he demonstrates a genuinely reformed character and a willingness to live in society peacefully and even benevolently, but does not make legal reparations for specific crimes?  Cronenberg’s wordless interplay is astonishing, particularly at the end, which remains so ambiguous, played without dialogue, wondering who this man really is, questions that also gnaw at his family.  Is this film about the moral redemption of Tom, or about the moral downfall of his family?  More specifically, it asks us to consider the cost that must be paid to maintain the family as the moral center of the United States.  Americans have a long history of violence, suggesting we secretly crave what we publicly condemn, where the film may be less about forgiving and more about forgetting, questioning how many lies can we absorb to still remain true to ourselves?