Tag: Alan Aruna

Hovering Blade (彷徨之刃, Chen Zhuo, 2024)

Posted on by

The funny thing about Hovering Blade (彷徨之刃, pánghuáng zhī rèn) is that it gets away with suggesting that the police won’t investigate properly and is quite unexpectedly sympathetic towards the hero’s desire for first hand retribution, albeit with the caveat that the police are seen to be investigating but possibly hamstrung by otherwise sensible legislation about the age of criminal responsibility. The Keigo Higashino novel on which the film is based had also been rooted in a moral panic that children were deliberately committing heinous crimes in the knowledge they couldn’t legally be punished for them.

The perpetrators in this case are a little older, though the argument is that if they had been properly charged for an offence committed in childhood they wouldn’t have gone on to commit further crimes in the belief that they are above the law. One of the men feels that in fact he is because it’s clear his wealthy and influential father often clears up his messes for him. A secondary issue hints at an anxiety about the nature of justice given that minors who commit serious crimes such as rape or murder receive much lighter sentences meaning they could be free to live a relatively normal life in just a few short years when their victims will obviously have no such opportunity.

Of course, that’s the point. The implication is that these young people were not fully capable of understanding their actions and could still be rehabilitated to become upstanding members of society. But that might not seem right to the families of their victims such as Li Chanfeng (Wang Qianyuan), a doting single father whose only daughter was raped an murdered by a pair of young hooligans with the assistance of their bullied friend. With judicial progress slow, he receives a tip off from the instigators’ underling and pays a visit to one of the other men who assumes he’s a burglar and attacks him leading Chengfeng to beat him to death with a baseball bat while a video of his daughter’s rape plays on the computer screen. 

The film presumably gets away with its hints towards vigilanteism by the fact the police are right behind him despite having received no tip off. The lead officer is however himself conflicted in beginning to doubt he can provide real justice because of the way the law responds to children who commit crimes and appears to sympathise with Changfeng to the extend he appears reluctant to catch him. The TV news and the people watching it also seem to understand and approve of his quest and desire for vengeance with a woman even helping him hide from the police if also urging him to turn himself in.

But the kind of justice Changfeng wants is incredibly direct. He doesn’t want these men off the streets because he fears for other people’s daughters, but wants to ensure they can’t live the share of life his daughter has been denied. The fact that, if legal justice is served, they’d get out and still be young men pains him without end and only death will answer it. Chased by the police, he begs them to kill him too to release him from his torment. 

Chen Zhuo keeps the tension high with a series of exciting action sequences including one though a disused water park near a moribund hotel the bad guys have been using as hideout. The reasons for their crimes are never explained aside from the ringleader’s dependence on his father, though they are assumed to be mere devilment and rebellion, an attempt to circumvent the system knowing they can’t be held legally responsible for their actions.

The familiar series of title cards at the film’s conclusion explain that the police caught all the wrongdoers while they have also lowered the age of responsibility though it wouldn’t have made any difference in this case. A flashback to another trio of teens suggests that they are emboldened by the fact the law can’t touch them, but the bigger issue is likely to be the way the system is corrupted by money and unequal access to justice. Changfeng is after all a lowly construction worker and is largely left on his own with nothing left to live for but vengeance. His quest to kill the killer is also a quest to kill himself and end his suffering. Zhuo follows him through the grimness of this everyday life, the squalid rooms and his general sense of emptiness but finally returns to the world of state justice and apparently compassionate police only sorry that they couldn’t do more to protect their fellow citizens from the “bad kids” of a changing society.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Article 20 (第二十条, Zhang Yimou, 2024)

Posted on by

There’s something quite strange going on in Zhang Yimou’s New Year legal dramedy Article 20 (第二十条, dì èrshí tiáo). Generally speaking, the authorities have not looked kindly on people standing up to injustice in case it gives them ideas, yet the film ends in an impassioned defence of the individual’s right to fight back in arguing that fear of prosecution should not deter “good” people from doing “the right thing” such as intervening when others are in danger. Nevertheless, the usual post-credits sequences remind us that the legal system is working exactly as it should and the guilty parties were all caught and forced to pay for their crimes.

In this particular case, the issue is one akin to a kind of coercive control. Wang (Yu Hewei) stabs Liu 26 times following a prolonged period of abuse and humiliation. After taking out a loan to pay for medical treatment for his daughter who is deaf and mute like her mother Xiuping (Zhao Liying), Wang was terrorised by Liu who chained him up like a dog and repeatedly raped his wife. Prosecutor Han Ming (Lei Jiayin) eventually argues that his attacking Liu qualifies as self defence under Article 20 of the constitution because even if his life was not directly threatened at the time it was in the long term and he did what he did to protect himself and his family from an ongoing threat.

Han Ming becomes mixed up in several different cases along the same lines only with differing levels of severity. Some years ago he’d worked on the case of a bus driver who was prosecuted after stepping in to help a young woman who was being harassed by two louts. His problem was that he got back up after they knocked him down and returned to the woman which makes him the assailant. Zhang has spent most of his life since his conviction filing hopeless petitions in Beijing. Meanwhile, Han Ming’s son, Chen (Liu Yaowen), gets into trouble at school after stepping in to stop obnoxious rich kid and Dean’s son Zhang Ke from bullying another student.

Now jaded and middle-aged, Chen first tells his son that he should he give in an apologise to get the boy’s litigious father off his back though Chen is indignant and refuses to do so when all he did was the right thing in standing up to a bully. Bullying is the real subject of the film which paints the authoritarian society itself as a bully that rules by fear and leaves the wronged too afraid to speak up. The choice Han Ming faces is between an acceptance of injustice in the pursuit of a quiet life and the necessity of countering it rather than live in fear while bullies prosper.

The thesis is in its way surprising given that the last thing you expect to see in a film like this is encouragement to resist oppression even if the idea maybe more than citizens should feel free to police and protect each other from the immorality and greed of others. It is true enough that it’s those who fight back who are punished, while the aggressor often goes free but according to Han Ming at least the law should not be as black and white as some would have nor be used as a tool by the powerful, or just intimidating, to oppress those with less power than themselves. 

Other than the theatrical drums which play over the title card, there is curiously little here of Zhang Yimou’s signature style while the film itself is not particularly well shot or edited. It also walks a fine line between the farcical comedy of Han Ming’s home life in which he perpetually bickers with his feisty wife (an always on point Ma Li) who worries he’s too interested in his colleague Lingling (Gao Ye) who turns out to be an old flame from his college days during which he too was punished for standing up to a bully by being relegated to the provinces for 20 years. A minor subplot implies that the justice-minded Lingling is largely ignored because of the sexist attitudes of her bosses who feel her to be too aggressive and often dismiss anything she has to say in what amounts to another low level instance of bullying. The film ends in a rousing speech which seems more than a little disingenuous but even so ironically advocates for the right to self-defence against a bullying culture while simultaneously making a case for the authorities having the best interests of the citizen at heart which would almost certainly not stand up particularly well in court.

Article 20 is on limited release in UK cinemas courtesy of CMC.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Schemes in Antiques (古董局中局, Derek Kwok, 2021)

Posted on by

Two very different men square off in the race to find a precious Buddha head and reclaim their family honour in an old-fashioned tomb raiding mystery from Derek Kwok, Schemes in Antiques (古董局中局, gǔdǒng jú zhōngjú). The key to the future seems to lie in the past as the heroes approach from opposing sides, one keen to expose a truth and the other seemingly to conceal it but both otherwise unable to escape a problematic family history and be rehabilitated as a member of one of the top five antiquing families in the China of 1992. 

Now a middle-aged drunkard, down on his luck Xu Yuan (Lei Jiayin) lays the blame for his present circumstances solely with his immediate forbears. A member of the Plum Blossom Five, five families who are the ultimate authorities on the authenticity of historical artefacts, Xu Yuan’s grandfather was executed as a traitor during the war for having gifted a precious Buddha head to the Japanese. In a fairly traumatic childhood, Yuan was abandoned by his his dad whom he believes to have been too badly damaged by seeing his grandfather die to be any sort of father while somehow even kids his own age called him scum in the streets because of the shame his grandfather’s transgression had placed on the family. Now running an electronics store which is in its way the opposite of antiques, Yuan has a fairly cynical view of the artefacts trade but is dragged back into it when the granddaughter of the Japanese soldier who received the Buddha head (Lili Matsumoto) insists on returning it to a direct descendent of the Xu family. 

Perhaps surprisingly, the issue isn’t really with the Japanese but the current status of the Buddha head which, after a duel of detection with well dressed rival Yao Buran (Li Xian) who is also trying to redeem his family honour, Yuan quickly realises is a fake suggesting his grandfather wasn’t really a traitor after all while giving rise to the question of what actually happened to the “real” one. When it comes to the antiques trade, perhaps there’s a question mark over the degree to which “authenticity”, whatever that might mean, really matters and if all the Plum Blossom Five are really doing is attempting to assert their authority over an unruly market as the accusation that one head of family in particular has long been knowingly authenticating fakes when it suits them to do so bears out. In something of a plot hole, Yuan is revealed to be an antiques expert despite having been abandoned by his father at a young age but his ability is for some problematic even if admired by his main rival in its ability to expose the hidden truth or as the film later puts it the real within the fake. 

In any case, it’s true enough that the battles of the past are still being fought by the grandchildren of those who started what they couldn’t finish. Yuan is joined in his quest by the feisty granddaughter of another Plum Blossom family (Xin Zhilei) who is also battling her grandfather’s sexism in his refusal to trust her with anything important in the antiques trade. She and Yuan end up squaring off against Yao who is largely playing his own game as they embark on a good old-fashioned treasure hunt in which they solve a series of puzzles set down by Yuan’s father to lead them towards the truth.

Discovering another father figure along the way, Yuan learns to accept his complicated legacy while redeeming his family honour and along with it his self worth in outsmarting just about everyone else to solve the final mystery. There is something refreshingly innocent in these well constructed, defiantly analogue puzzles which rely on cultural knowledge and mental acumen along with a spirit of curiosity, while there’s also a fair amount of running away from bad guys and escaping from collapsing tombs filled with artefacts that might in a sense be cursed even if not quite literally. There are definitely a lot of schemes in antiques, something of which Yuan himself takes full advantage, but they’re also in their own way pieces of a puzzle in which the fakes are less red herrings than gentle pointers towards other truths some of them buried under layers of subterfuge and obfuscation only to be dragged into the light by those with dangerously curious minds.

Schemes in Antiques streams in the US Sept. 10 – 16 as part of the 15th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

International trailer (English subtitles)