Chinese Movie Time.

Yi miao zhong / One Second is something of return to form for Mainland Chinese Cinema heavy weight Yimou Zhang, with his personal take on the Cultural Revolution front and centre again.

Yi miao zhong / One Second - Wei Fan & Zhang Yi.

 

 

 

 

Coming over the bleak dunes, Zhang Yi (in Zhang Yimou's 2021 Xuan ya zhi shang / Cliff Walkers), the ragged lead gets into the dusty strip mall town in time to see an equally scruffy figure steal a reel of film from a courier’s motor bike left outside the bar. It takes some time to find out why this is so important while they fill  in the back stories of the characters.

The thief is Liu Haocun (also Cliff Walkers), one of those “My goodness - you’re a girl” characters familiar from the Kung Fu movies and earlier and wider. She’s a companion to Minzhi Wei  in Zhang Yimou’s best film, the 1999  Yi ge dou bu neng shao / Not One Less, both children called on to carry adult responsibilities with their Cultural Revolution backgrounds a key element of the plot.

Zhang Yimou

Along the way the purloined reel gets to to change hands as the protagonists flannel truck driver Yang Yu with conflicting stories and Newsreel Nunber 22 falls off a truck to be dragged along a dirt road.

The damaged reel is important for each of  the leads - income for the impoverished girl (lampshades made of movie films are trendy), his Mr. Movie  status and that of his tiny Community 2 for Town movie house operator Wei Fan (I Am Not Madam Bovary) and the powerful significance of one second (actually several) for Zhang Yi, who proves to be on the run from a prison camp.

The film’s most memorable passages is set in Wei Fan's undecorated district cinema where he involves the entire tiny community in the work of restoring the damaged film reel, preparing bowls of distilled water and drying racks to clean it while stressing to the stranger the importance of his work to his family and his community.

Heroic Sons & Daughters.

The film takes immense care with the technical stuff, finding a fifties hand joiner, utilising film cement with a steel blade and wooden applicator stick and contriving a looping set up, which Wei Fan proudly tells Zhang Yi his fellow operators are unable to manage, so you've got to wonder why the restored reel shows negative damage when it should have been black scratching marks. 

They have to wait till the house empties after Wei's regular showing of  Zhaodi Wu’s  Ying xiong er nü / Heroic Sons and Daughters  (1964) which the clips make look livelier than the few movies we get to see from that era. Wei explains that the audience will stay watching anything he puts on the screen with a hint of pride.

The security division are on the trail of  Zhang Yi and it is the film’s most poignant concept that neither they or Haocun Liu are able to understand when Wei slips frames of the image to the fugitive.

There is another tacked on happy ending, when the now scrubbed up and freshly clothed protagonist is given his liberty and returns to the village. It has been suggested that this tampering is the cause of the delay in the film’s release.

Not the least appealing aspect of the piece is it’s place in the line of movies lingering on the importance of the movie shows of the maker’s youth - obviously Cinema Paradiso (1988) along with  The Last Picture Show (1971), Etore Scola’s  Splendor (1989)  Australia’s 1997 Picture Show Man or the 2007 Hong Kong Lo kong ching chuen / Mr. Cinema. One Second is not disgraced in this company.

Barrie Pattison 2022