China Film Journal

Zhou Xun plays Li Mi, a plucky Kunming cab driver secretly nursing a broken heart and obsession—the man she loved disappeared
four years ago and their one-way line of communication are the letters that he writes to her, which she religiously stores and memorizes. Caught between faith and desperation, nothing, it seems, will reunite Li Mi with her old flame.

Then Li Mi takes on a fateful fare: two shifty migrants that have something to hide. Many convenient coincidences later, in a plot invovling hostage-taking, extortion, drug mules, mistaken identities, and changed identities, and Li Mi just might be close to finding her missing lover and closing the door on that part of her life.

It is in the nature of these films to rely on coincidences and other deus-ex-machina elements to move the plot forward—it doesn’t matter that they aren’t realistic, because movies aren’t based on probability theory in the first place. However, you sometimes wish that there could be a bit more judgment exercised as to when enough is enough and it’s time for you to sober up and go home. The tangled skein of the plot does get unraveled by the end, but as enjoyable as it is to know (almost) everything that transpired in this movie universe, there in a sense in which presenting all the facts makes the film seem too pat, too clever. It would have been better to leave the audience some unsettling loose-ends to quibble over.

As far as performances go, Zhou Xun, as Li Mi, is obviously the center of the film. She has plenty of good moments and a few maudlin ones, but otherwise manages to carry the film. Variety seems to concur:

Pic is motored by another saturated perf from the remarkable, throaty-voiced Zhou, who’s ably partnered from the halfway mark by Zhang (the lead in the big-budget war drama “Assembly”) as the tough but fair cop. Deng, also from “Assembly,” is fine as the slippery Ma/Fang.

However, there was one performance bothered us a bit, which was that of Wang Baoqiang’s, the young actor that has become quite popular in China for his small but often memorable roles in films, ranging from A World Without Thieves to Li Yang’s Blind Shaft, as well as
the main role in the hit TV series Soldier Sortie. What tends to grate is the fact that he plays similar roles in so many of the movies:the innocent, hapless migrant worker. It was, in his earlier films, somewhat endearing. No matter what side of the law he was on, he was always the victim and the hero—he represented the pure heart of inner China, the migrants who can no longer make (or want to make) a living off the land and are forced to the move to seamy underbelly of Chinese cities, a moral vacuums where dodgy characters operate and manipulate them. Wang’s performance is not bad as it goes, but you wonder whether or not the guy, barely twenty-five years old, has already been typecast.

Final verdict: nothing life-changing, but not a bad yarn. This is a step in the right direction.
We wouldn’t mind seeing a few more Memento-esque films come out of China. Missing
people, mistaken identities, desire, obsession—take these ingredients and give it a dark spin.

We saw this movie in the theater, in Paris, which it seems is one of the only places where this movie could be seen on the big screen other than at film festivals. The film is actually from a few years back, but was never shown in China, and while we think there are probably DVDs floating around, we can’t say that we’ve seen any of them.
The film is about a down and out Guizhou woman living in Beijing who ekes out a living for herself and deadbeat husband by selling DVDs. When her husband gets in trouble with the law and ends up behind bars, it’s up to her to find out how to bail him out. She goes back to Guizhou and ends up, with a former lover, setting up a funeral crying business, meaning that she gets paid to cry and mourn at funerals (this is supposed to bring some dignity and prestige to the deceased and their family).

The film is definitely of the wry and often none-too-subtle social commentary genre, but is still a comedy, of sorts, which is nice. There are times when their barbs are a bit too obvious, as with the prison warden who professes ideals of crime, punishment but is will not refuse a woman who offers him a quickie in the office. However, the film on the whole moves quite nicely, never bogging down, telling the story simply and effectively.

The Time Out review was pretty positive, as was the one we found on efilmcritic.com Some Chinese people who watched it recently in Paris seemed to like the film as well. However, the film was banned in China (there are maybe two sex scenes in the movie, none of them too raunchy for our tastes), and from a 2006 post from Simonworld, it seems that the director of the film, Liu Bingjian (刘秉鉴), has gone into …. selling men’s beauty products for Amway instead, which, if true, is a sad commentary on the state of Chinese art cinema.

Luckily for you, especially those of you in China, the entire movie is available in the video above.

Technorati Tags: 刘秉鉴，哭泣的女人，贵州，电影，地下，文艺，中国，madame wang, larmes, tears, social, funeral, death, parlor, singing, music, ritual, life, culture, change

Wong Kar-wai is celebrating the opening of his shit movie My Blueberry Nights in the US this Friday by selling some merchandise – most notably, $95 t-shirts, $50 posters, and $25 postcards. And if you want to thank him for ripping you off in person, you’ll get your chance in New York at a fashion boutique store called Opening Ceremony, where Wong is going to be on Wednesday afternoon. We hope that someone tells him that the US is facing a recessions and that the real incomes are not increasing for the average American. $25 for a postcard? You can get four lattes in Manhattan for that price! Sheesh!We’ve read a couple of blogs that have mentioned the Hong Kong International Film Festival, but here is yet another one from a blog dedicated to Asian Cinema. There are several movies mentioned in this post that we’re really looking forward to seeing, especially Old Fish, which was mentioned in several other blogs of HKIFF participants as well.From Screen Daily we learned that Summer Palace director Lou Ye’s new film, Bitch, was one of the films selected for the fourth Cannes Atelier. This year’s Atelier features 15 projects from 14 countries and aims to help directors get financing so that they can bring their projects to completion.

Last but not least, some cinematic dessert from YouTube: the top 10 Jackie Chan stunts. Not to be missed.

Cross-posted at Shanghaiist