Chinese film festival
To celebrate the Chinese New Year, the Cluny cinema has a Chinese film festival every February. The films are always recent ones and there's a mixture of dramas and documentaries. Here's what I thought of three of them (spoilers included):
Tuya's Wedding
The story of a Mongolian woman whose husband becomes disabled. She herds sheep in the desert. We see her spending her days collecting water from a spring with a donkey and herding the sheep on camelback. It's too much for one person to do alone.
So she and her husband decide they must divorce and she must remarry because it would be impossible otherwise for her to support their two children. This isn't an easy decision.
Once the divorce goes through, Tuya, who is attractive, has a number of suitors. But she stipulates that her disabled ex-husband must be able to continue living with them.
For a while it looks as though she will marry an old schoolmate who has become rich because of involvement in the oil business. So it seems as though she'll stop being a sheep herder and instead become a city person.
The oil man tries to get deal with the ex-husband by putting him in a home. There's a poignant scene where the ex-husband stares out the window at his family getting into the oil-man's car outside the home, one by one. Later on that night he tries to kill himself. The oil man is informed by phone but he doesn't tell Tuya. Luckily a neighbour manages to track her down and tell her.
She returns to their sheep farm and the same neighbour, who is in love with her, tries to dig a well for her. He doesn't succeed with the well but nonetheless, after some misunderstandings which are eventually resolved, they decide to marry. The ending is bittersweet because it's clear that although she and her neighbour like each other, the whole set-up is hard on everyone.
I was really stuck by how much Mongolia seemed to resemble the Rocky Mountain states of the US. There was the same "big sky country" feeling. Even though people were dressed in tribal clothes and there were camels as well as horses, and yurts, it still really reminded me of the Wild West. The way the people moved and their mannerisms seemed similar. Also the yurts made me think of the Navajo in Arizona, who also have round buildings and are herders.
I don't know how accurately the film depicted the life of ordinary Mongolians nowadays. It didn't try to hide details of modern life such as TVs (everyone seemed to have one) and cars (some people had one), so I imagine it was at least somewhat accurate. It certainly didn't idealise the working conditions of sheep herders. On the other hand you could see why that kind of life could be very attractive. Tuya's son, who was about ten I think, had a lot of freedom and initiative.
The story kept me interested all the way through and I loved seeing all the different places. I was just a bit dissatisfied with the ending since I wasn't sure how to interpret it. Tuya's new husband and her old one get into a fight at the wedding. She runs out of the building and hides in another one, and someone calls her back, but she ignores whoever it is and starts to cry. Does this mean the whole thing is an utter disaster? Or is it just a temporary blip? I'm sure it would make more sense to me if I understood Chinese. Anyway it was well worth seeing.
Summer Palace
I thought this would be an interesting film because it's about a student in Beijing during the time of the Tienanmen Square protests. Unfortunately it wasn't quite what I expected, though it would be great material for a parody.
The main character is a young woman from North-East China who gets a scholarship to Beijing University. We see her with her boyfriend in her home town, and we get a brief glimpse of her father, who runs a small shop. Then all of a sudden she's in Beijing, at the student residence, which is pulsing with other bright young things and blaring, tinny Western-sounding music. I think this may have been intended to seem very exciting.
She becomes friends with another young woman student, and then gets together with a guy who is considered very cool. Eventually they break up for arbitrary but (doubtless) highly painful reasons.
She writes in her diary a fair bit, and also spends a lot of time writhing around at the bottom of an empty swimming pool, looking haunted. I suppose we're meant to resonate with the musings of her poetic soul, but the problem for me was that there was no context whatsoever for her angst - we don't know anything at all about her family, or the political situation, or anything outside the narrow world of herself and her friends. We don't even know what they're studying. All we see is young people being neurotic at each other in a particularly insular kind of way.
Then the Tiananmen protests happen - the bit I was looking forward to - but they turn out to just be a kind of big party. No reason is given for them and no reason is given for their being broken up either. It all just sort of ends and the students all look a bit sad. Our heroine is whisked back to her home town by her ex-boyfriend.
Then the film starts jumping forward in time. The heroine's ex-boyfriend (the cool one) and her old friend from college go to Berlin and some of the time they're lovers. But her friend kills herself eventually, again for no apparent reason.
Meanwhile the heroine has been moving from city to city, doing professional work (exactly what it is we aren't told) and having various affairs, but all the while pining for the cool ex-boyfriend. He has been pining for her as well, and when he moves back to China he looks her up. We see him driving up to meet her in his SUV. They spend a bit of time together but it's clear that the spark has gone, and they go their separate ways.
The main characters' penchant for SUVs and other such status symbols didn't exactly endear me to them. But the thing that made the movie not only tedious but really mind-numbingly awful for me was the sex. There were about ten scenes in which the heroine had sex with one or other of her boyfriends. We see them panting together in a mechanical kind of way, and then, exactly two-thirds of the way through each of these scenes, some brooding, melancholy violin music kicks in. It got to the point where I was bracing myself in preparation for those violins, but no matter how hard I tried to prepare myself, I couldn't help wincing whenever they started.
Apparently the director has been banned from making movies in China for five years because the Chinese government is angry about this movie. I would have thought they would be pleased with it - it makes the Tiananmen protests seem whimsical and adolescent, with no real meaning. However I've read some reviews that suggest the government is actually angry about the sex. That would make more sense.
At the end we're given a summary of the characters' lives after the events of the movie. But I had a very hard time summoning up the energy to read this.
Manufactured Landscapes
This was a documentary about the work of the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, which focussed particularly on his work in China. Burtynsky takes photos of industry on many different levels. The film starts with a long pan through an immense factory. After going through the building row by row, we're given a view from one end of the factory towards the other. You can't even see where the far end is - it's out of sight.
We also see places where things are taken apart, such as a village where people smash up old computers on their doorsteps in order to try and recover the metals contained in their processing boards. One photo showed an old woman who, Burtynsky said, would have survived the Civil War and Mao, standing on her doorstep surrounded by computer debris. The groundwater of the town is contaminated with heavy metals.
We're shown mountains of coal waiting to be brought to China's power stations, and the Three Gorges Dam. Some of the workers there are questioned about what they think of the dam and answer "well, it's just a job for me," and "well, it's good for the country I suppose". We see people dismantling their own buildings in preparation for their being flooded.
The main thing that struck me from this film was the apparent lack of imagination shown by the Chinese government. While the scale of industrialisation there is very striking and obviously something new, the nature of the industrialisation seems to be a carbon copy of what happened in the US, Germany and Britain. The same tired old assumptions are being made about success and progress. Thus we see a young woman in her luxury apartment in Shianghai talking complacently about how the old quarters of the city are disappearing. Then a man from one of those old quarters describes how residents are intimidated into abandoning their wooden houses so that they can be demolished and replaced with concrete high-rises.
Not the most cheerful subject matter for a film, but it was very well-made.
Tuya's Wedding
The story of a Mongolian woman whose husband becomes disabled. She herds sheep in the desert. We see her spending her days collecting water from a spring with a donkey and herding the sheep on camelback. It's too much for one person to do alone.
So she and her husband decide they must divorce and she must remarry because it would be impossible otherwise for her to support their two children. This isn't an easy decision.
Once the divorce goes through, Tuya, who is attractive, has a number of suitors. But she stipulates that her disabled ex-husband must be able to continue living with them.
For a while it looks as though she will marry an old schoolmate who has become rich because of involvement in the oil business. So it seems as though she'll stop being a sheep herder and instead become a city person.
The oil man tries to get deal with the ex-husband by putting him in a home. There's a poignant scene where the ex-husband stares out the window at his family getting into the oil-man's car outside the home, one by one. Later on that night he tries to kill himself. The oil man is informed by phone but he doesn't tell Tuya. Luckily a neighbour manages to track her down and tell her.
She returns to their sheep farm and the same neighbour, who is in love with her, tries to dig a well for her. He doesn't succeed with the well but nonetheless, after some misunderstandings which are eventually resolved, they decide to marry. The ending is bittersweet because it's clear that although she and her neighbour like each other, the whole set-up is hard on everyone.
I was really stuck by how much Mongolia seemed to resemble the Rocky Mountain states of the US. There was the same "big sky country" feeling. Even though people were dressed in tribal clothes and there were camels as well as horses, and yurts, it still really reminded me of the Wild West. The way the people moved and their mannerisms seemed similar. Also the yurts made me think of the Navajo in Arizona, who also have round buildings and are herders.
I don't know how accurately the film depicted the life of ordinary Mongolians nowadays. It didn't try to hide details of modern life such as TVs (everyone seemed to have one) and cars (some people had one), so I imagine it was at least somewhat accurate. It certainly didn't idealise the working conditions of sheep herders. On the other hand you could see why that kind of life could be very attractive. Tuya's son, who was about ten I think, had a lot of freedom and initiative.
The story kept me interested all the way through and I loved seeing all the different places. I was just a bit dissatisfied with the ending since I wasn't sure how to interpret it. Tuya's new husband and her old one get into a fight at the wedding. She runs out of the building and hides in another one, and someone calls her back, but she ignores whoever it is and starts to cry. Does this mean the whole thing is an utter disaster? Or is it just a temporary blip? I'm sure it would make more sense to me if I understood Chinese. Anyway it was well worth seeing.
Summer Palace
I thought this would be an interesting film because it's about a student in Beijing during the time of the Tienanmen Square protests. Unfortunately it wasn't quite what I expected, though it would be great material for a parody.
The main character is a young woman from North-East China who gets a scholarship to Beijing University. We see her with her boyfriend in her home town, and we get a brief glimpse of her father, who runs a small shop. Then all of a sudden she's in Beijing, at the student residence, which is pulsing with other bright young things and blaring, tinny Western-sounding music. I think this may have been intended to seem very exciting.
She becomes friends with another young woman student, and then gets together with a guy who is considered very cool. Eventually they break up for arbitrary but (doubtless) highly painful reasons.
She writes in her diary a fair bit, and also spends a lot of time writhing around at the bottom of an empty swimming pool, looking haunted. I suppose we're meant to resonate with the musings of her poetic soul, but the problem for me was that there was no context whatsoever for her angst - we don't know anything at all about her family, or the political situation, or anything outside the narrow world of herself and her friends. We don't even know what they're studying. All we see is young people being neurotic at each other in a particularly insular kind of way.
Then the Tiananmen protests happen - the bit I was looking forward to - but they turn out to just be a kind of big party. No reason is given for them and no reason is given for their being broken up either. It all just sort of ends and the students all look a bit sad. Our heroine is whisked back to her home town by her ex-boyfriend.
Then the film starts jumping forward in time. The heroine's ex-boyfriend (the cool one) and her old friend from college go to Berlin and some of the time they're lovers. But her friend kills herself eventually, again for no apparent reason.
Meanwhile the heroine has been moving from city to city, doing professional work (exactly what it is we aren't told) and having various affairs, but all the while pining for the cool ex-boyfriend. He has been pining for her as well, and when he moves back to China he looks her up. We see him driving up to meet her in his SUV. They spend a bit of time together but it's clear that the spark has gone, and they go their separate ways.
The main characters' penchant for SUVs and other such status symbols didn't exactly endear me to them. But the thing that made the movie not only tedious but really mind-numbingly awful for me was the sex. There were about ten scenes in which the heroine had sex with one or other of her boyfriends. We see them panting together in a mechanical kind of way, and then, exactly two-thirds of the way through each of these scenes, some brooding, melancholy violin music kicks in. It got to the point where I was bracing myself in preparation for those violins, but no matter how hard I tried to prepare myself, I couldn't help wincing whenever they started.
Apparently the director has been banned from making movies in China for five years because the Chinese government is angry about this movie. I would have thought they would be pleased with it - it makes the Tiananmen protests seem whimsical and adolescent, with no real meaning. However I've read some reviews that suggest the government is actually angry about the sex. That would make more sense.
At the end we're given a summary of the characters' lives after the events of the movie. But I had a very hard time summoning up the energy to read this.
Manufactured Landscapes
This was a documentary about the work of the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, which focussed particularly on his work in China. Burtynsky takes photos of industry on many different levels. The film starts with a long pan through an immense factory. After going through the building row by row, we're given a view from one end of the factory towards the other. You can't even see where the far end is - it's out of sight.
We also see places where things are taken apart, such as a village where people smash up old computers on their doorsteps in order to try and recover the metals contained in their processing boards. One photo showed an old woman who, Burtynsky said, would have survived the Civil War and Mao, standing on her doorstep surrounded by computer debris. The groundwater of the town is contaminated with heavy metals.
We're shown mountains of coal waiting to be brought to China's power stations, and the Three Gorges Dam. Some of the workers there are questioned about what they think of the dam and answer "well, it's just a job for me," and "well, it's good for the country I suppose". We see people dismantling their own buildings in preparation for their being flooded.
The main thing that struck me from this film was the apparent lack of imagination shown by the Chinese government. While the scale of industrialisation there is very striking and obviously something new, the nature of the industrialisation seems to be a carbon copy of what happened in the US, Germany and Britain. The same tired old assumptions are being made about success and progress. Thus we see a young woman in her luxury apartment in Shianghai talking complacently about how the old quarters of the city are disappearing. Then a man from one of those old quarters describes how residents are intimidated into abandoning their wooden houses so that they can be demolished and replaced with concrete high-rises.
Not the most cheerful subject matter for a film, but it was very well-made.