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New Chinese Cinema
Nov. 22nd, 2004 01:02 pmThree recent movies to recommend about life in China today and the struggle to survive in a society changing too quickly.
The first two are actually linked and overlapping movies by director Fruit Chan. They are Little Cheung, about an ambitious little Hong Kong boy and a little girl he meets who is illegally in Hong Kong with her family -- and Durian Durian. Durian Durian begins in HK and finishes in the north of China after the main character, a young prostitute, returns to her hometown where no one knows what that good job she had down south actually was. These movies are insightful character studies and shot in a wonderfully calculated casual manner with a real feel for the streets, restaurants and cramped apartments where the people live out their lives. The amateur acting is impressive and there is a lot of humour and harsh reality thrown together in the wok.
Last night, we saw Unknown Pleasures about people trying to escape the poverty of their coal-blackened province and get somehow to prosperity in Beijing through scholarship, petty thugdom, showbiz dreams or the army. Like Fruit Chan's movies, this is shot with an almost documentary-like feel and there are long, telling takes on people's faces. The characters, who mostly can't express their true feelings, say volumes in their silence. The signifcance of finding a single American dollar bill becomes a running joke and a pathetic metaphor for their dreams.
Tutu, who was just in China this summer, says this movie (which made a bunch of top ten lists in North America in 2002) was completely unknown. It think this has less to do with censorship than with a Chinese people who are desperately grasping at the new global dreams of prosperity and aren't ready to accept the frightening social and environmental cost of realizing them.
The first two are actually linked and overlapping movies by director Fruit Chan. They are Little Cheung, about an ambitious little Hong Kong boy and a little girl he meets who is illegally in Hong Kong with her family -- and Durian Durian. Durian Durian begins in HK and finishes in the north of China after the main character, a young prostitute, returns to her hometown where no one knows what that good job she had down south actually was. These movies are insightful character studies and shot in a wonderfully calculated casual manner with a real feel for the streets, restaurants and cramped apartments where the people live out their lives. The amateur acting is impressive and there is a lot of humour and harsh reality thrown together in the wok.
Last night, we saw Unknown Pleasures about people trying to escape the poverty of their coal-blackened province and get somehow to prosperity in Beijing through scholarship, petty thugdom, showbiz dreams or the army. Like Fruit Chan's movies, this is shot with an almost documentary-like feel and there are long, telling takes on people's faces. The characters, who mostly can't express their true feelings, say volumes in their silence. The signifcance of finding a single American dollar bill becomes a running joke and a pathetic metaphor for their dreams.
Tutu, who was just in China this summer, says this movie (which made a bunch of top ten lists in North America in 2002) was completely unknown. It think this has less to do with censorship than with a Chinese people who are desperately grasping at the new global dreams of prosperity and aren't ready to accept the frightening social and environmental cost of realizing them.
