Category Archives: Film reviews

Devils on the Doorstep: Film Review 《鬼子來了》影評

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In a phrase: A pantomime until the end, at which point it rushes to satisfy nationalistic appetites.

(Spoilers below)

This film is set in a small Chinese town called Guajia (hang up armor) under Japanese occupation during the second world war. Two prisoners are mysteriously delivered to Ma Dasan, a man who lives in the village, at knifepoint by a stranger who does not reveal his face. Ma Dasan is told to hold on to the two prisoners, a Japanese soldier and a Chinese translator, until “they” come for them and to make sure they don’t escape or die, or Ma Dasan, played by Jiang Wen, will be killed. Slapstick comedy ensues as Japanese soldiers come into the village several times and very nearly discover the prisoners, Ma Dasan is picked by the villagers to kill the two prisoners, but can’t do it so the village sends to the nearest town to hire a professional killer who also fails to carry out the task. All the while the villagers have built up somewhat of a rapport with the Japanese prisoner through the translator, who deliberately mistranslates between the two according to his own best interests. I found these slapstick elements and the “comic” mistranslations all a bit trite and pantomime-like.

The film goes some way to humanizing the Japanese soldier in captivity, as we learn that he is just a farmer like the villagers in Guajia. The slapstick comedy in the film is also divided between Japanese soldiers and the Chinese peasants – with the same actors used to play two hapless Japanese soldiers as play two of the main villagers. The resulting idea that comes across is that these are simply bumpkins playing at war – which is possibly the closest the film comes to a nuanced view of war.

When the villagers draw up a contract with the prisoner, stating that they will return him to his unit in exchange for food for the village, we are presented with the “baddy” of the piece – the unit commander, who is the incarnation of the Chinese (and Western) impression of Japan’s wartime ideology. In a climactic scene in which the unit commander “reveals his true colors” the whole village is slain and burned to the ground while Ma Dasan is fetching his wife Yuer from her mother’s house to get their share of the reward for returning the soldier. While the scenes are not quite as graphic as the bayoneted fetus in Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre, there is the murder of the elderly village head, a woman and a young boy and the human side to the Japanese soldier in the village we saw before disappears. The cherry on the cake is when the unit commander stops the Japanese soldier who was taken prisoner from committing seppuku by announcing that he has already received notice that the war was over, but had let his soldiers perpetrate this massacre before telling them. This seemed to be an attempt to fan the flames of Chinese anti-Japanese sentiment and lacked the breadth of nuance of films like The Railway Man which tries to contrast war mentality with post-war mentality, or like the Human Condition (《人間の条件》) film trilogy. In the Railway Man, a man confronts the Japanese translator that was party to his torture long after the war is over and they eventually come to be friends. Human Condition on the other hand documents one man’s journey from enthusiasm and seeing the colonial project as a humane civilizing mission which has been tainted by violent and corrupt officers on the ground to a realization that the problem is with the entire idea of colonialism itself (see more here).

I didn’t feel that this film achieved its goal in this sense, given that this is what Jiang has stated he was aiming to achieve. There are hints that it was trying to, however, for example, as the villagers of Guajia are being killed, there is a broadcast from the Emperor of Japan, announcing Japan’s decision to lay down arms and making reference to the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Another interesting aspect of the film was the portrayal of the Kuomintang (KMT) or Nationalist army. Ma Dasan returns to the local city where the Japanese soldiers are being held in detention after the war and he goes on a rampage with an axe, killing many prisoners. The KMT leader then makes an impassioned speech about how much he too has suffered and compares this to the suffering of Japanese people themselves. When Ma Dasan is executed by Japanese troops on order of the KMT he honks like a donkey when asked for final words. This denouement sets the stage for the Communist takeover of China – as the Kuomintang are seen to be simply pawns of the Allied Forces and overly friendly to the Japanese. That the film portrays the KMT in government during the victory over Japan (albeit as puppets of the allies) and the lack of overt anti-Japanese sentiment among the villagers, who are also portrayed for the most part as ignorant bumpkins, may be why the film was banned.

Overall this film is watchable in the same gung-ho way as many older Western movies on German prisoner of war camps. There is no deeper level of analysis here and it is a bit of a crowd-pleaser.

Score: 2.5/5

I found this Chinese language review from a mainland Chinese viewer online: http://i.mtime.com/liyang5201314/blog/2762633/

《天注定》影評 A Touch of Sin Review

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A Touch of Sin is a film by Jia Zhangke (賈樟柯). I’ve only seen Platform (《站台》) by him before, so am unfamiliar with the majority of his work. The Chinese title of the film differs from the English title, in that the Chinese means literally, “fate appointed by the heavens,” whereas the English title has a more Christian ring to it, although I read that it is apparently a nod to the English title of a martial arts film called A Touch of Zen (《俠女》).

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What not to watch: Mazu Procession review 最好不要看的《媽祖迺台灣》影評

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OK, so I’ll start with the positives, this is not the worst film on the Mazu procession that I’ve ever seen, but that’s mostly because I had to trawl through the NTU vault of Taiwanese documentaries to write a review every week for my professor. The film makes a good (albeit an unquestioning and superficial) attempt at explaining what’s going on formalistically during the pilgrimage, which sets out from the north of Taiwan over 9 days, bringing Mazu, the sea goddess from her home temple to tour the island before returning home, followed by pilgrims hoping to get her blessing by carrying flags which they get blessed at every stop along the way. The film also made an attempt to explain why people were providing food and the different ways in which people participate in the pilgrimage, which already beats out the shaky student films that don’t even put Chinese subtitles, with only a brief, rather smug voiceover telling you the name of each bit in Taiwanese, but no explanation offered as to what it actually represents. You soon realize that this film was made with a specific purpose, however, and that purpose is encapsulated well at the end when the indefatigably cheerful presenter Richie Jen (a Mandopop star and actor, who finishes almost every sentence in the film with an 喔!/wo! a 加油!/jiayou! or a 辛苦啦!/sin-khó͘la!) sings a song which is as about as subtle as China’s foreign ministry: he changes the lyrics of his previous saccharine hit 〈對面的女孩看過來〉 (Look over here, girl [opposite]), to 〈對面的觀眾看過來〉(Look over here, audience [opposite]) into a marketing ploy packaging the Mazu procession for tourists from what I’m guessing he means by 「對面的觀眾」(the audience opposite), could it be… on the other side of the strait? (shock horror! Quick! Take siege to the theaters!).

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aosRlnxg9I&w=420&h=315]

The changes aren’t limited to the title, he continues to drivel on about how cute Taiwanese people are, especially the old ones and the young ones (Yes, yes, Taiwan, we already got the memo… NO, BUT WE’RE REALLY FRIENDLY!!! REALLY REALLY FRIENDLY喔!!!!!… Yeah, you’re alright I suppose… NO, WE’RE REALLY REALLY SUPER FRIENDLY! SUPER FRIENDLY, LIKE REALLY REALLY FRIENDLY喔!!!!!… I know, I know, Taiwanese people are very friendly… THAT’S BETTER喔!!!!!!!). The film failed to examine any darker side of the procession, like the associations between mafia and certain temples in Taiwan, although it pretended it was going to for a while in Changhua with the promise of fights over the direction of the pilgrimage by local temples, though it ultimately led to nothing. Other documentaries on the subject go into this link in more detail, and it provides a more interesting perspective than this cutesy romp. It also failed to give any critical perspective on the social purpose of Mazu, or to question the beliefs of those taking part. This wasn’t in the film’s remit, however, as it was essentially a promotional video – a glorified travel program, representative of the ruling Kuomintang’s line on mainlanders, specifically, “let’s take them for all the money we can.”

2/10 (It at least made an effort to be understood)

That is all.

 

Film Review: No Man’s Land (2013) 影評：寧浩的《無人區》

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I heard about this film on the Sinica podcast, where it was described by a critic as a Coenesque dark comedy. When I heard Coenesque I was thinking Burn after Reading, The Hudsucker Proxy or Fargo, not No Country for Old Men, but the film resembled the latter more than the Coens’ out-and-out comedies. Despite this, I thought many aspects of the film were funny, especially the comparison between Lü, the hotshot Beijing lawyer and the ruthlessness and uncouth spite of the “simple” people of the West of China. For this reason the climax of the movie, in which Lü suddenly grows a conscience was a little forced for me, and took away from the idea that despite his education and his sophisticated life in the city, he is no different from the extortionists and bullies he meets in the West of China, even though he thinks he is, which had been the underlying premise of the film in my eyes up to that point. Sadly the director feels the main character needs redemption, and he sacrifices himself selflessly when he could have gotten away, which seems a little bit of a stretch for the character, as we know him, up to that point. The film has a little bit of the character of Yu Hua‘s ‘Leaving at Home at Eighteen’ (余華的〈十八歲出 門遠行〉) but all that grit is lost to the melodrama of the ‘brave self-sacrifice’ trope  that is typical fare in Chinese films and crime dramas.

The villain of the piece didn’t have any of the gravitas or psychological depth of Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men, and by the end of the film we’re left confused as to his motives, as he neither seems purely motivated by money or psychotic enough for his desire to kill being about anything more than money, which results in a two dimensional traditional pantomime villain role, instead of the potentially more nuanced role i felt the character could have been given. The other characters from the west were more believable, including the comic scene where one of the falcon dealers is hammered to death by an innocent-looking mentally handicapped rest-stop resident.

The film is interesting in that it lends another, slightly more gritty perspective, to traditional American monster flicks, like Wrong Turn, or The Hills Have Eyes, except that the monsters aren’t some bizarre inbred mountain tribe, they’re just people driven by poverty or greed to survive. I thought that the discussion about the difference between animals and humans was another interesting aspect to the film, which I talked about in another film review here. It also came up in an interview with Professor Huang Zonghui of National Taiwan University here:

In this film, many of the characters featured are “animalized humans” as Cary Wolfe puts it, which makes the title a play on words – as in there are no people in this place, only animals masquerading as humans – they have been reduced to fighting for survival. One scene that highlights this, is the scene in which Lü is stuck behind a truck carrying straw, which results in a confrontation, in which one of the men in the truck pisses on Lü’s car, like an animal, displaying its superiority . What makes Lü’s emotional journey in the film a little incomprehensible is that his behaviour towards the denouement of the film is at odds with his insistence that the only difference between man and beast is that man can make fire. This is the moment in the film when I thought he was going to set himself alight, but ended up just setting the truck alight with him inside it. I wasn’t sure how his thought process turned towards redemption, as he had previously rationalized all his actions on the basis of survival. Why then does a country bumpkin girl’s attempt to save his life, stop him from abandoning her, when he had been deaf to her pleas before.

One possible explanation is that it is the only way that Lü can see himself as different to the falcon dealer, and as more than just an animal. The falcon dealer can thereby be seen as a mirror for Lü, in which he sees his true nature, from which the only escape is the final gesture of self-sacrifice.

Despite this rather forced ending, the movie is darkly comic in a good way at parts, which distinguishes it from Yu Hua’s short stories (which are simply dark without the comedy). 3.5/5

For Chinese speakers, you can read reviews by film critics Wang Mu and Zhou Liming here