China Film Journal

Earlier this year, we prefaced our interview of a rising star in film with the provocative title, The World is Not Enough: Has Jia Zhangke Permanently Left the Art House?

I should hope not. From my view Stateside it seems that Jia Zhangke (贾樟柯) has just arrived. After all, I had been waiting since 2006 for the U.S. release of Still Life (Sanxia Haoren: literally, “The Good People of Three Gorges”). So I waited. And waited. And wouldn’t you know, I waited.

Still Life made its American premiere in January 2008 at New York’s IFC Center. It reached the West Coast in April, at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and a month later, showed for a week at one of the Lumiere Theatres in the Bay Area. In other words, an art house. So is Jia leaving the art house, just as he has entered it?

I think two different meanings of that phrase at play. One is subjective, about the film itself: serious, often experimental and avant-garde, produced independently, with a singular vision (i.e. that of an auteur). One is objective, the circumstances in which the film and by extension, the filmmaker, is received: where it plays and what audience.

The term “art house” or “art film” turns out to be a uniquely American one, due to the monopoly of commercially-oriented Hollywood films in American theaters (and abroad), leaving acknowledged serious films domestic and international limited to certain theaters. They could be specialty film centers such as the IFC in New York or Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, or repertory theaters that show classics for a day and new releases for a week, two on popular demand. In the suburbs, they could be the occasional chain-operated theater set aside for niche movies, or the single screen reserved at the 30-plex theater.

An independent film with strong prospects may open at several dozen screens. For example, a Jane Austen adaptation starring Emma Thompson (and a not-so-famous Kate Winslet). Sense and Sensibility opened at 70 screens in 1995. That sounds like a lot, but with nearly 300 million people and 400 metropolitan areas, it clearly did not show within driving distance of many Americans. In contrast, The Dark Knight opened at over 4000 screens in the US. The art film’s initial unqualified success did allow it to expand to several hundred screens, thus “leaving the art house”.

A more recent example is the phenomenon known as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Buoyed by the art house successes of Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm, Ang Lee’s film was able to open at . . . 16 screens!! Two reasons come to mind. Foreign language films have smaller potential audiences, and so they started smaller. Also, they opened smaller at the start of December to build up to Christmas season.

Well Christmas came and went, and a month later it was playing at close to 200 screens, so it was bumped to 700 screens for another three weeks. But wait, it wasn’t going away. In fact those 700 screens were packed. So well after the holiday season, Crouching Tiger played at 1200 screens, then 1700…until it reached an unheard-of 2000 screens for a foreign language film. The punctuated equilbrium of this theatrical progression is fascinating to chart. It appears the powers that be expected such a film only needed 173 screens when it opened those screens, and when it exceeded all expectations, took some time before it made non-art screens available to the wire-fu epic. Put another way, it was the Obama of the cinema world.

At its theatrical peak, in February 2008, Still Life played at two screens. The World, his previous international success, hit three screens in the US. Of course, none of these record film festival screenings, which are lovely feathers in the cap but do little for accessibility. Seattle on May 23 and Austin on October 12? No thanks. Given the 4000+ screens available in the US, it seems even the proliferation of international films can find their, um, niche in a physical art house. Perhaps Netflix and soon the Internet will render inconsequential the movie bottleneck in the theaters. But the reviews, the buzz, the “event-ness” of a film today accompany generally just its theatrical release.

There is another world, one that falls somewhere between the visibility of repertory theaters and the singularity of film festivals. That’s the art museum world. At some point art museums decided to show international films as part of its regular exhibitions. Perhaps it’s an extension of their experimental film and video showings, or as a long awaited acknowledgment of narrative film as art with a capital “A”. While each film shows for a day or two, the program (often focusing on one filmmaker) may last weeks, giving the curious time and opportunity to taste some of the oeuvre.

The San Francisco Bay Area is fortunate to have several such venues for film. This month, SF Museum of Modern Art is showing the film series Rediscovering the Fourth Generation as part of its exhibit on Chinese contemporary art. Films include Wu Tian Ming’s River Without Buoys, Xie Fei’s Black Snow, and Huang Shuqin’s Woman Demon Human.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts tends to focus on experimental and documentary type films. Next month it premieres Fengming: A Chinese Memoir by Wang Bing, which showed at last year’s Cannes. Here’s the Variety review. He Fengming survived “anti-rightist” persecutions for decades and lived to tell her three-hour tale.

Across the Bay, the Berkeley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archive functions more like a stand-alone film center. Though nominally tied with the art museum’s contemporary Chinese art exhibit, the PFA had an extraordinary program this month. Unknown Pleasures: The Films of Jia Zhangke allowed Bay Area audiences to see for the first time “the quartet of beautifully constructed, profoundly astute examinations of a changing China”, as the Village Voice called Pickpocket (Xiao Wu), Platform, Unknown Pleasures, and The World.

That series has ended but is followed up this weekend with a four-day, five-film seriesI Love Beijing: The Films of Ning Ying , capped by a “master class” from Ning Ying (宁瀛) herself. But wait, there’s more! November features Mahjong: New Independent Chinese Cinema, a sample of 21st century visions from Beijing, Sanxia, and Anyang to an art house, I mean art museum, near you.

The feature film debut of Robin Weng Shou-ming (翁首鸣), Fujian Blue follows a group of disaffected, purposeless souls who spend their time blackmailing middle-aged women and clubbing away their twenties. Such a premise somehow transforms into an absorbing narrative of deeply felt characters, a trenchant social commentary, and a tone poem to a nearly-lost generation.

In the early 1980s, Fujian became a vital hinge on the open door policy that fostered China’s economic miracle, which brought suburbs, video games, and minvans to the province. At the same time, it lured many Chinese to seek their fortune abroad, and has made Fujian a center for human trafficking, particularly the “golden triangle” of Fuqing, Changle and Pintang. Into this picture step the Neon Knights, the gang of Roppongi, Amerika, and Dragon, who capitalize on the void left by emigre husbands by catching their “remittance widows” with local lovers (sometimes one of their own), and blackmail them. Call it a Chinese version of trickle-down economics. That some knights bear nicknames reflecting their fathers’ destinations adds poignancy to this sad state of affairs.

“Neon Knights” is also the title for the movie’s first half, which focuses on Amerika and his mother, a woman involved in the local church and local trafficking operation. Bonds are already strained between mother and son – the college grad won’t get a job, hangs around bad influences. The plot picks up when he finds out she’s also taken a local lover. Amerika convinces his reluctant friends to videotape and blackmail her mom. It works, but his expressionless face at seeing his mother make the cash drop is telling. There is no victory in this game, and no joy in their decadant lives.

Mom is angry and asks “the Czech”, the local underworld leader and smuggler in Fuqing, to smoke out the extortionists. This development puts a little fright to the little gang and sends them to chill out in Pingtan. Here, for the first time, the young folks seem to enjoy themselves and their youth, riding ATVs on the beach, taking a ferry ride to visit their friend, and having sex with the local girls. One of Fujian Blue’s achievements is its street-level perspective and non-judgmental tone, which allows us to become involved with its characters, and draw us into experiencing their world as they live it, including its moments of elation and wonder.

A couple of such moments come near the end of their merry vacation from petty crime, when Amerika and a friend are visiting Dragon, who is hiding out back home for reasons of his own. On the very old and small ferry, one of them acts out the scene from Titanic where Jack Dawson (a stowaway, incidentally) is flying without wings. Later on that ferry trip, he notices a mass of Taiwanese boats, and wonders why on earth they would be here, off the coast of China. To refuel for their fishing trips, comes the ferryman’s reply. Can ships that small cross the Straits? Even smaller than this one, says the ferryman. You can picture the gears turning in Amerika’s head.

Dragon is the subject of the second half, “At Home, At Sea”. It is set in motion when the gang decides to give him the windfall from Amerika’s mom. We realize why when he returns home to his poor fishing village and family in debt for his older brother’s emigration. Dragon uses part of the illicit cash to help pay off those debts as well as support his mom and sister. The rest of it – let’s just say its fate involves an even younger group of rogues in a scene both hilarious and sad.

In an especially plangent scene, his younger sister declares during a break from school she doesn’t want to head back, but instead wants to go abroad. No, Dragon says, go back to school. They have a fight. Pretty basic stuff, but the following silence is heart-rending. How can he explain how cruel adult life can be? They compromise: she skips school that day, her brother taking her to walk along the breakwater. If the neon wilderness of Fuqing is disappointing, there are no hopes to disappoint in his homely backwater village. The price of his family’s survival may be its ultimate fracture.

Eventually, Dragon decides to go abroad and seek his fortune in the West, perpetuating the cycle of debt and desperation, but also hope and persistence in the face of a two-faced globalization that welcomes the movement of goods and ideas but is cruel to the movement of human beings, all of which it fuels. This persistence may seem absurd, when sometimes emigres leave to pay a “snakehead” for having previously smuggled their relative, or even a prior unsuccessful trip they’d taken themselves. A reference to the human-trafficking tragedy at Morecambe imbues real-life gravity to their plight. But this persistence of dreams is also a persistence of memory, of the fact that Fujianese are everywhere, making up a majority of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and the United States. It also reflects the persistence of a buccaneering spirit, reckless but not always self-destructive, which fuels both the crimes and the dreams that feed on each other. Like generations of Fujianese before them, they don’t accept their truncated roles – not in the new China of great expectations.

Several qualities make Fujian Blue a unique standout effort. Weng’s employ of non-professionals punctuates the palpable realism in every scene, whether its the young men teasing the sole woman among them in a gently sexual way, or giving running commentary on the date in their blackmail video. His use of ribald humor also anchors the characters’ authenticity – the Czech tells his card-playing friends that Czech detention wasn’t so bad because they let you watch porn. I also have to give props to the subtitles team, as I’ve never seen Chinese or any other foreign language translated as “beayotches” and “bros before hoes” (sic).

Speaking of the colloquial, yet another unique and daring feature is the liberal use of the Hokkien dialect (Fujian), which is as different from Mandarin as English is from French. Such use is both accurate (reflecting how people really speak) and illuminating (of China’s true polyglot history and sense of regional identity). Indeed, it’s mentioned that two of the gang hail from Hunan and Sichuan (which also signals that in much of China, Fujian is a placed to be envied). Finally, it is also politically and even psychologically daring to suggest that young men in Fujian (the winners of globalization, both in the world and in China) look wistfully at Taiwan. Perhaps it’s not that Fujian itself is envied, but it’s the closest to what is enviable in the world.

Along with some other features, the attitude towards the characters and their lives reminded me a bit of a breakthrough Scottish film called Trainspotting. Like that movie, we have young men and one woman, lives of petty crime and decadence, and sometime exuberance that the audience is invited to share. Even the usage of dialect lends a superficial resemblance. More likely, much of it is coincidental, or rather convergent – they share distinguishing traits of a great narrative, lightness in the face of gravity, specificity in the face of stereotype, and multiplicity in the face of dogma.

The problems they face are ultimately different, too: whereas the struggles of Scottish addicts are self-induced, that of these Fujianese rogues result largely from their legitimate though MTV-fueled dreams and the contrasting reality of their horizons. The Chinese title Jīn Bì Huī Huáng is an idiom literally meaning magnificent looking in green and gold. It is used to describe a building, or to use an English idiom word, a facade. After watching the movie at the Mill Valley Film Festival, I learned that Robin Weng is just 26. I have every hope that he will continue to seek out facades and with his remarkable vision, penetrate them.

There’s an overtly Freudian feel to Wang Fen’s The Case, which is fitting for a film is set in Yunnan, a province whose emphasis on the matriarch is well noted. Despite that, the focus of the story is Dashang, a man wallowing in convalescence who runs a guesthouse with his controlling and distrustful wife. It’s the ying and yang of their tempestuous relationship that provides most of the humor. But rather than siding with the wife, the sympathy of the film seems to fall on Dashang, a man who wears the expression of someone who’s conceded defeat to the world.

Amidst this melodrama, Dashang’s life takes a turn for the weird when he discovers a seemingly innocuous case drifting down the river near his home. Temptation gets the better of him, and he conceals it in his greenhouse, breaking the lock to reveal its gruesome contents. The discovery has a disastrous affect on Dashang, amplifying his repressed feelings of guilt, lust and frustration. To make matters worse, shortly after the case appears, a bewitching temptress and her husband take up residence in the couple’s guesthouse. Wang Sifei plays the role of femme fatal with a smoldering sexuality rarely seen in Chinese cinema, and for Dashang, the guilt of possessing the case, sexual temptation and pressure from his wife converge into a crescendo of inner panic.

Director Wang Fei’s debut feature (she previously worked as an actor and documentarian) is accomplished and well executed piece of cinema. The film moves along at a rapid rate, with the editing, spooky soundtrack and acting all contributing to the frenetic and claustrophobic feel. Wang has been quoted as saying that he film is concerned with the space between fantasy and reality and the film certainly has those qualities. Without wishing to give too much away, the ending of the film will be a divisive point for viewers (lets just say the film breaks Rule Number 1 taught in most creative writing classes in college).

The Case has been somewhat hard to classify with it being labeled everything from black comedy to psychological thriller, but it’s best to regard the flick as plucky independent, serving as a welcome middle ground between mainstream fluff and the consciously serious work that China’s realist directors are concerned with. For me, Wang Fei has played out a miniature Hitchcock thriller in Yunnan. For a debut offering the film has enough to warrant a viewing, and also point to a potentially promising career for the director.

Links:
Yunnan New Film Project
Trailer

On February 16, Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai (王小帅) won his second Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, taking honors for best script for his new film In Love We Trust 《左右》, a film that has one whopper of a premise: the daughter of a divorced couple develops leukemia and the only way that they can save her is by having another child (which will serve as a donor for the first?). There are a couple of previews and interviews on the video-sharing sites. We’re not sure when it comes out in China, but we like Wang’s movies despite their get-under-your-skin-in-a-weird-way sentimentality, so we’re looking forward to this one. The first video is a preview and the second one an interview with the cast and crew.