Friday 11 October
Leading Chinese director Tian Zhuangzhuang is best known for his sublime historical epic Blue Kite (1993), whose depictions of the horrors of life under Mao got him banned from filmmaking for three years. His greatly anticipated return is a remake of the most revered Chinese film of all time: Fei Mu’s 1948 Spring in a Small Town. Just after World War II a sickly landlord, Liyan, living in a half-ruined manor receives an unexpected visit from an old university friend, Zhiwen. Zhiwen was once the lover of Liyan’s wife, Yuwen, and as passions rekindle, modern romance threatens to unravel traditional bonds of loyalty. The remake preserves the long, carefully designed takes, hauntingly dark atmosphere, and stealthily increasing tension of the original, but there are critical differences. Tian has abandoned the most innovative feature of Fei Mu’s version–Yuwen’s strikingly modernistic voice-over, a whispered stream of consciousness that complicates and poeticizes everything that happens–and replaced it with an almost classical film language, turning a radical commentary on China’s breakdown into a nostalgic celebration of a lost perfect past. His goal is radical: to heal the rupture between China’s traditional past and its postrevolutionary present. But the result, though splendidly graceful, is overly decorous and oddly lifeless. In Mandarin with subtitles. 112 min. (SK) (Landmark, 4:15)
Wedding in Ramallah
I At least since I vitelloni and The Wild One in the 50s, movies about disaffected youth have constituted a kind of subgenre for filmmakers interested in historicizing the present–an undertaking whose most distinguished practitioners in Chinese-language cinema include Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and the much younger Jia Zhang-ke, born in 1970. I still haven’t caught up with Jia’s first feature, Pickpocket (1997), but his stunning epic about the transformation of China through capitalism, Platform (2000), marks him as the most gifted and stylistically and thematically contemporary Chinese filmmaker to have emerged in years. His third feature, shot on digital video, isn’t an achievement on the same order, though it takes on the same theme, in a story about two unemployed 19-year-olds. Jia’s virtuoso long takes, choreographed mise en scene, and feeling for character and behavior place him in a class by himself, yet in China his films have circulated only on black-market videos–a point alluded to here in a sequence where his first two features are being sold, along with Pulp Fiction, by a vendor on a bicycle. As the first of Jia’s works to be shown in Chicago (Platform got a single screening at Northwestern University’s Block Museum in Evanston), this automatically qualifies as a must-see. In Mandarin with subtitles. 113 min. (JR) (Landmark, 7:00)
Santa Maradona
Twelve narratives intertwine on the mean streets of Mexico City in this dramatic feature by Fernando Sariñana, based on Juan Madrid’s short-story collection Chronicles of Dark Madrid. In Spanish with subtitles. 113 min. (Landmark, 9:00)
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With a musical running gag that alone is worth the price of admission, Andreas Dresen’s funky, likable German feature charts the profound but not completely negative effects of adultery on two lower-middle-class couples, best friends until one husband beds the other’s wife. Set in Frankfurt an der Oder–not the affluent Bavarian capital but a poor east German relation–the story unfolds mostly at the characters’ workplaces: Uwe operates the bar and grill of the title, his spouse sells perfume in a department store, her new lover broadcasts radio horoscopes, and the lover’s wife mans a tollbooth near the Polish border. Like Mike Leigh’s work, the film was largely improvised after much rehearsal, but Dresen heightens the immediacy with grungy, bleached-out digital video and nervously mobile camerawork. The actors hold their own against the camera’s intimacy, their up-close visages registering a host of conflicting emotions. The fact that their characters are so unprepared for what’s happening gives the improvisations a satisfying edge. Dresen maintains a neat balance between humor and pain, never overreaching into bathos or satire: one scene finds Uwe and wife roaming the greensward of their apartment complex with an empty birdcage, forlornly calling for their children’s parakeet, which has flown the coop. In German with subtitles. 105 min. (RS) Also on the program: Jesse Rosensweet’s eight-minute Canadian short The Stone of Folly. (Music Box, 9:30)
