cruelty of the gaze (and spoilers)
Saw Up the Yangtze last night. I think it's accurately described as a docu-drama: it's effective, smart and packs a restrained but powerful punch. OTOH, it entirely dodges any discussion of the wider impacts of the 3 Gorges Dam: there's no attempt to expand the film beyond the kind of first-visual-impressions take on one family and one cruise ship.
The director notes influence from Heart of Darkness and Gosford Park (for which I'd say, rather, Upstairs, Downstairs) and those come across loud and clear, but there are other things going on here, too, not least of which is a kind of easy stereotyping. Our leads are (a) a poor but wise and patient peasant-father, survivor of the cultural revolution, who is displaced once again by modernisation; (b) his shy, truculent, but adorable moppet daughter, whose inner grace eventually shines through her rude beginnings, as she is slowly converted into an ideal cruise-ship servant; (c) a little prince, scion of rich family, who tries his hand at being a tour guide on the boat. These three seem to offer alternative takes on China itself, rather unfortunately. Not nearly as unfortunately, however, as the retired Americans who bumble through the film, essentially well-meaning bearers of neo-colonialism. The camera's eye is pitiless, regarding the travails of the poor peasant family, the pretensions of the semi-urbanised young guide, and the lost in translation multinational tourists.
For me the film has two decisive moments and they're both around the theme (rather submerged in the film's incident) of responsibility.
The first is when the cocky young guide is let go by the cruise company. His manager code-switches freely between English and Chinese, but whenever he speaks of confidence, it is in English. He welcomes new recruits with a homliy about the need for confidence; he exhorts shy young girls to be confident when serving the tourists; he dwells on the need for confidence for all young people in this changing world. When he fires the young guide, he speaks initially in Chinese, about "probationary periods" and "the needs of the company," but he switches to English to list the guide's faults, the reasons why he's being dumped, and the first one is "over-confidence." His confidence is of the wrong sort: he thinks himself equal to the tourists, he asks for tips, rather than being quietly, deferentially and invisibly "confident."
The second concerns the peasant-father who, stripped by rising floodwaters of all the resources he's managed to scrape together over the years, falls to working on the new concrete riverbanks, which rise steeply right behind his hut and fields. The exact relationship between his life and the works - the bitter irony of it all - is concealed until the moment when he finally has to leave the hut forever, carrying a heavy wooden wardrobe on his back. His precarious ascent, up the slope he has helped create, shot from behind and below, is almost certainly a direct quotation from some well-known film (perhaps a John Ford western?): if it's not, it will soon become the source of a cinematic cliche in its own right. During this sequence, though, I started to wonder about the role and presence of the film-makers themselves: they had a great shot; they were really killing on cinematic gravitas; but I couldn't help wondering why none of them could give him a hand. He was clearly struggling, he wasn't a young man; if he'd fallen, he would probably have injured himself quite badly. Later in the film we are treated to a time-lapse montage of the flooding of the river valley and the hut, shot from the top of the works: it begins where the film began, with low waters and many small islands, and it ends when the hut is entirely obliterated. Even though the wardrobe-ascent is the cinematic moment, the impact of the fim-maker's choices came home to me during this later montage: this is where the film-maker's foreknowledge of impending doom becomes apparent; this is where we see, at last, what he saw when he decided to film this particular family in this situation, and it slowly becomes clear that the film-maker has made a choice, to allow these people to suffer, to refuse to help them in all their struggles, because they will tell the story he wants to capture.
Maybe I'd've said all this years ago if I watched more documentaries. Maybe it is an usually stark example of the problems which always attend these efforts. I'm not sure. It's profoundly uneasy viewing, though.
The director notes influence from Heart of Darkness and Gosford Park (for which I'd say, rather, Upstairs, Downstairs) and those come across loud and clear, but there are other things going on here, too, not least of which is a kind of easy stereotyping. Our leads are (a) a poor but wise and patient peasant-father, survivor of the cultural revolution, who is displaced once again by modernisation; (b) his shy, truculent, but adorable moppet daughter, whose inner grace eventually shines through her rude beginnings, as she is slowly converted into an ideal cruise-ship servant; (c) a little prince, scion of rich family, who tries his hand at being a tour guide on the boat. These three seem to offer alternative takes on China itself, rather unfortunately. Not nearly as unfortunately, however, as the retired Americans who bumble through the film, essentially well-meaning bearers of neo-colonialism. The camera's eye is pitiless, regarding the travails of the poor peasant family, the pretensions of the semi-urbanised young guide, and the lost in translation multinational tourists.
For me the film has two decisive moments and they're both around the theme (rather submerged in the film's incident) of responsibility.
The first is when the cocky young guide is let go by the cruise company. His manager code-switches freely between English and Chinese, but whenever he speaks of confidence, it is in English. He welcomes new recruits with a homliy about the need for confidence; he exhorts shy young girls to be confident when serving the tourists; he dwells on the need for confidence for all young people in this changing world. When he fires the young guide, he speaks initially in Chinese, about "probationary periods" and "the needs of the company," but he switches to English to list the guide's faults, the reasons why he's being dumped, and the first one is "over-confidence." His confidence is of the wrong sort: he thinks himself equal to the tourists, he asks for tips, rather than being quietly, deferentially and invisibly "confident."
The second concerns the peasant-father who, stripped by rising floodwaters of all the resources he's managed to scrape together over the years, falls to working on the new concrete riverbanks, which rise steeply right behind his hut and fields. The exact relationship between his life and the works - the bitter irony of it all - is concealed until the moment when he finally has to leave the hut forever, carrying a heavy wooden wardrobe on his back. His precarious ascent, up the slope he has helped create, shot from behind and below, is almost certainly a direct quotation from some well-known film (perhaps a John Ford western?): if it's not, it will soon become the source of a cinematic cliche in its own right. During this sequence, though, I started to wonder about the role and presence of the film-makers themselves: they had a great shot; they were really killing on cinematic gravitas; but I couldn't help wondering why none of them could give him a hand. He was clearly struggling, he wasn't a young man; if he'd fallen, he would probably have injured himself quite badly. Later in the film we are treated to a time-lapse montage of the flooding of the river valley and the hut, shot from the top of the works: it begins where the film began, with low waters and many small islands, and it ends when the hut is entirely obliterated. Even though the wardrobe-ascent is the cinematic moment, the impact of the fim-maker's choices came home to me during this later montage: this is where the film-maker's foreknowledge of impending doom becomes apparent; this is where we see, at last, what he saw when he decided to film this particular family in this situation, and it slowly becomes clear that the film-maker has made a choice, to allow these people to suffer, to refuse to help them in all their struggles, because they will tell the story he wants to capture.
Maybe I'd've said all this years ago if I watched more documentaries. Maybe it is an usually stark example of the problems which always attend these efforts. I'm not sure. It's profoundly uneasy viewing, though.