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.     

Michael

Markus Schleinzer

MICHAEL                   B                     

Austria  (96 mi)  2011  d:  Markus Schleinzer

The icily cool Austrian veneer doesn’t cover up the fact this is a creepy little film, one where the audience can’t help but hate the protagonist (Michael Fuith), a non-descript, ordinary, Fassbinderish Herr R. (1970) kind of guy who goes to work every day at an insurance company, keeps his home neat and clean, and never draws attention to himself so as not to expose the fact that he’s keeping a 9-year old boy locked in his basement.  We watch the outside of his house in the evening when the shades automatically come down closing the window, literally blocking out all signs of the outside world.  Markus Schleinzer worked as a casting director for fellow countryman Michael Haneke from 1994 to 2010 before venturing out on his own to make this first feature film.  It’s by no means a show stopper or one that even attempts to impress, instead it moves with that glacier pace of meticulous control, where every shot is designed to establish the ordinary rhythm in the man’s life, where keeping a boy hostage as a sex slave is all part of his normal routine, offering nothing salacious or sexually provocative, but the age of the boy and the locked bar on the basement door tells us all that we need to know.  The boy himself (David Rauchenberger) is never named, where his identity is completely submerged, but he’s adorable and docile, obviously accepting of his circumstances for some time now, as he’s allowed to join Michael for dinner, sitting at a table with perfect placemat settings, and together they clean up afterwards and wash and dry the dishes like a well oiled machine.  The boy colors pictures and regularly writes letters to his missing parents that Michael never sends, but in obsessively orderly fashion, keeps the letters in a hidden file, much like the Nazi’s maintained meticulous train records for the transportation of the Jews to all the death camps. 

This emotionally repressive style of film has become familiar to filmgoers by now, where the purposeful exactitude is hard to fault, as the composition and editing scheme reveals not only what’s happening, but also makes a comment on the suffocating psychological implications by choking out any hint of emotions onscreen, where it plays out like a recorded diary, never adding any personal commentary, as the interior world of Michael may be pretty close to a void, where the director often captures him sitting all alone in the dark.  Occasionally, however, something stirs inside and he takes the boy out on a field trip excursion, like a visit to a petting zoo, his hand always firmly clasped, where for a brief moment he’s actually part of the world outside.  But for every moment of optimism, it also produces that wincing moment when he’s locked back inside again like a caged animal on display whose only contact is during regular visiting hours, where he’s forced to capitulate to Michael’s world, whatever that may entail.  Where this film does make a brief break from the typical austere stylization is adding bits of humor, where outlandishly enough this occasionally becomes a comedy about pedophilia, where the audience is primed to laugh and poke fun at the sexual possessor, to see what a fool he can make of himself, similar to the use of violence in Haneke films, like FUNNY GAMES (1997), where the films play to the audience’s expectations.  But every variation from the norm is extremely brief, where the established routine dominates the landscape.  

As anyone with children knows, it’s hard to raise children alone, and despite Michael’s orderly world, he’s no exception, as kids act up, get hurt, cry, or even get sick, all things beyond his control, challenging the range of his parental skills, as he has to keep his prized possession alive and in good health. We get clues into the boy’s deepening psychological depression and his moments of rage, while also seeing Michael occasionally off his game, as sometimes the boy just isn’t in the mood to play and instead feels listless and disconsolate, where it ends up as Michael boiling over with inner rage.  He’s a man used to getting his way, and as the boy gets older, he’s less inclined to show any interest in what Michael wants from him, instead growing more aloof.  This presents a challenge for Michael, who has no experience whatsoever in human relations or how to motivate the disinterested, and every attempt leads to a further misstep on his part, where it’s his all controlling world that is coming apart, like steam exploding from a boiling teapot.  He lives in constant denial over his captive’s abuse, filling his life with ordinary moments, watching television, living in an ordinary world, but occasionally he gets a good look at himself in the mirror which makes him feel exasperatingly feeble, like a child himself, helpless and uncomfortable, as apparently he’s never matured emotionally beyond the age of his captive, where all he can be is a bully on the block.  A few years ago, there was a common theme of movies using the Turtle’s song “Happy Together,” often to humorous effect—see Wong Kar-wai’s HAPPY TOGETHER (1997) or Christophe Honoré’s MA MÈRE (2004), for instance.  Here the director has chosen a variation on a similar song to a chilling and strangely provocative effect.