Shadows of Chinatown

Time was that you could see half a dozen new Chinese films running each week in Sydney (and Melbourne). Some weeks I did and quite a few of them made it into my year's best lists. Well that was them and this is now. A trickle of mainland product does still make its way into Event George Street. 

Sometimes I nerve myself up for a taste in the hope they'll deliver another Wolf Warrior - no such luck lately.

Since the eclipse of  Feng Xiaogang, Zhang Yimou has asserted himself as the major figure of Chinese cinema. He’s added Olympic spectaculars to his status as fifth generation survivor and he is the country’s one director whose work is likely to hit our cinemas. After the agreeable Yi miao zhong / One Second, yet another hymn to the past of cinema,  hopes rose with the appearance of his new Manjianghong / Full River Red, the current Chinese New Year box office champion, though we hear disquiet about the way it was given IMAX outlet monopoly distribution.

Zhang Yimou

There’s no doubt about authorship. It has the near monochrome colour scheme of  Zhang Yimou’s Ying / Shadow. The bright red of the cherry they offer close-ups is arresting in this setting and the arrival of dawn after two hours of gloom is sufficiently striking to have been given more significance. There’s court intrigue in the manner of his Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia / Curse of the Golden Flower and it’s as morbid as his Da hong denglong gaogao gua / Raise the Red Lantern.

The opening grabs attention, with the downward drone shot racing with the squad of soldiers seen running through the alleyways between the tiled roofs  of the Chancellor's residence. This one is another leather armor piece, military costume given special significance. It’s Song Dynasty (circa 1146 AD) China, and the Chancellor has set up a negotiation with the opponent Jin Kingdom, only for their ambassador to be murdered and the secret document, in the leather purse equivalent of a Diplomatic bag, to go missing.

 Manjianghong / Full River Red -  Jackson Yee, Shen Teng.

The order has gone out from prime minister Jiayin Lei for an immediate investigation supervised by deputy, misleadingly rotund-comic Yunpeng Yue. The scene with TV personality Shen Teng as the corporal, cheating execution by the drawing of straws, suggests we are in for a conman comedy. Turns out the murderous commander is his uncle Jackson Yee (the Lake Changjing films).

After some fast talking by Shen Teng, the pair are allocated two hours to unravel the mystery on pain of death, with them rapidly figuring that they will also be executed for knowing the state secrets involved.

Things then get to be increasingly complicated. The camera speeds through the lane ways backed by striking bursts of Chinese Yu Opera. The caged raven becomes significant and edged weapons are held to throats. No one is what they seem and there’s an accumulation of bodies. Any character shown sympathy is doomed. The film is big on violence to women.

Some of it is quite ingenious, like a “Purloined Letter” scene where the missing document is sitting on the table in full view as the characters mill about, though only one of them recognises it. 

What starts as a comedy becomes a detective story and ends with a patriotic oration about recovering lost territory (hint, hint) as the massed troops shout the now classic poem by the late General Yue Fei. Despite the considerable film making skill and big budget on display, two and a half hours of all this murder, plotting and betrayal is unpleasant viewing.

It doesn’t leave you curious about those hundreds of Chinese movies we are not getting to see.
 

Of course S.B.S. is another source and they are currently recycling director Shunji Iwai's 2018 Ni hao, Zhihua / Last Letter. Finding a Japanese director at work on a mainland production already seems a novelty but what would I know. I see maybe a dozen of their six hundred title annual output and it turns out Iwai was actually raised in China. 

 He's someone who occasionally figures on the fringe of our awareness. His 1996 Swallowtail Butterfly and 2001 All about Lily Chou-Chou got a few runs and The Last Letter recalls elements of his first movie the 1995 Love Letters, though the place of letter writing in our lives has shifted to the point where they have to have a motivating scene with star Zhou Xun (this film's producer Peter Chan's 2005 Perhaps Love), where her husband destroys her cell phone and they do cutesy communication on Apple symbol cups linked by string.

The plot is complicated to the point of confusion.  Even Hao Quin, the on screen writer, is thrown when he finds the school girl sisters he knew as a child wandering round the building with their large white dog. Turns out that Zou Xun had gone to the thirty year class reunion intending to announce that her sister Zifeng Zang (Aftershock) had died but Xun was immediately mistaken for her by everyone, including Hao Quin, who had a crush on the deceased, then upsetting her sibling survivor, who had fancied him. 

Last Letter - Zhuo Tan, Ge He.

After the funeral the children had re-distributed themselves among their relatives and we get their activities, cross cut with scenes twenty years previous. They find letters to which they fake replies. Hao Quin's obsession with the Zifeng Zang character, who had become the subject of his one autobiographical novel, gets to dominate this welter of sub plots and the film's most effective scene and possibly-unintended focal point is his meeting with Shanghai singer Hu Ge playing Quin's one time object of desire's worker husband who had courted her while working at her University kitchen ("While you were listening to lectures, I was cutting vegetables"). Ge's failed attempt at upward social mobility had left him a violent alcoholic. The dialogue between two men, who had fixated the same woman, is the most compelling element of the film and brings some clarity to what we are seeing.  

Most interesting is the setting in Dalian town in Northeast Chian Liaoning province, once part of Manchuria, with which the director has a family connection. The letters, a pivot of the plot, are written in calligraphy across the page, old people have a dance class in the park, the homes and businesses could be in a modern American or Australian town and the largely available-light winter photography by Japanese cameraman Kanbe Chiqui gives the piece a look different to the other Chinese films we see.

Last Letter, itself largely a remake of director Iwai's earlier work, which was in turn distantly derived from a Murakami Haruki novel, is now scheduled for another filming. It's one for the curious.

Barrie Pattison 2023