The Love Songs of Tiedan
Hao Jie's second feature suffers the fate of a typical art-house film, which means sinking at the box office without even a ripple. His debut film Single Men (2010) was a breakout garnering a basket of international awards but never attempted to gain approval for domestic release. As such, it did not need to remove the naughty edges that might have rankled the censors.
In both movies, Hao displays the curiosity of a teenage boy who is just discovering the wonders of sex. Tiedan is an adolescent who falls for a much older neighbor and, years later, her daughters. The story is very fluent and full of bawdy humor, yet it lacks the small details that make Single Men so refreshing. There is no ideology in either movie, but someone growing out of puberty is not really a subject everyone is comfortable with, and the story is hard to tell well under the circumstances.
Young Style
Art-house auteur Liu Jie takes a swerve toward commercial cinema, but stops at the mid-point. He fills this coming-of-age story with jokes, but insists on casting non-professional in all the roles except the female teacher. Qin Hailu gets a bunch of hilarious lines admonishing her students to work tirelessly toward the holy grail for every Chinese high-school student, namely passing the all-important national entrance exam and enrolling in a prestigious university. Here is one: "Sacrifice yourself for the happiness of all your family".
Liu pushes the envelope by dwelling on a teenager's fixation on pursuing his love interest, which is a big no-no under current guidelines of movie content. But he dodges the bullets by having the romance as the cause for the protagonists' academic failure hence turning the story into a cautionary tale. Dong Zijian, son of China's super-agent in the entertainment industry, did not disappoint his mother, or the audience. It's a very auspicious debut for an insider.
Apart Together
Wang Quan'an won a Silver Bear award for best screenplay at the 2010 Berlin International Film Festival for this film. For whatever reason it did not premiere in China until 2013－"without any cut or revision" explains the filmmaker－and stil failed to garner any significant box-office return.
A dexterous account of a newly-married Shanghai couple who were separated in 1949 in the maelstrom of political upheavals the family drama is full of subtlety punctuated by occasional bursts of funny melodramatic turns. It features natural dialogue and top-notch performances all round, especially Lisa Lu and Ling Feng, who play the reunited couple. However, it doe not offer a dramatic climax or any obvious message, political or otherwise, leaving many filmgoers perplexed about the moral of the story. On the plus side, it gives you plenty of room for philosophizing.
Drug War
HongKong's reigning king of the gangster genre Johnnie To resisted entering the mainland market for a long time. When he finally did, he did not make too many concessions. As a matter of fact, this film, set and made in the mainland and financed by mainland money, served to widen the boundaries of what a crime drama can depict on mainland screens.
Not only are the drug-taking scenes realistically portrayed, but the heroic cop is more three-dimensional than most characters in this genre. The weakness, this time, lies in the antagonist, the Hong Kong drug-make who gets caught in the opening sequence. The director maintains his fast pacing and his signature violence is also intact, but the story leaves something to be desired in psychological depth.
The Grandmaster
Wong Karwai's outing in the martial arts genre is either a masterpiece or a deeply flawed exercise in exerting control over a story beyond his control. The movie has both narrative loopholes large enough for the whole martial arts academy to march through and cinematography so lush and mesmerizing you'll forget about the story anyway. The title character disappears for the middle hour, for one. But one thing everyone can agree on: Zhang Ziyi delivers a knockout performance that steals the show and unseats the title character. The movie is currently on the shortlist of nine finalists for the upcoming Best Foreign Language Film of the Academy Awards.
We recommend:
