After accidentally boiling a shark alive at the supermarket where he works, a young man embarks on an epic quest to find the estranged father he hasn’t seen since he was a child in Zhong Kaifeng’s surreal treatise on sound and memory, Atlantic Rhapsody (大西洋, Dàxīyáng). Set between the early ’80s and the present day, the film charts the fates of those who have been displaced by the economic reforms of the ’90s and the increasingly consumerist society of today.
There is something rather absurd about the idea of keeping a mini shark in a supermarket just for decoration. This fearsome marine predator has been placed in a box and constrained, a lonely figure who exists only to be looked at with a pane of glass continually between it and the rest of the world. In some ways, Ding Mao (Roy Wang) will come to feel this way about his father who has become inaccessible to him except through the memories he is able to conjure up after heading north to his hometown.
Ding Jianguo (Yin Fang) was a fan of The Man From Atlantis which they all watched dubbed into Mandarin in the town square. He hears a strange tale from a mysterious blind fortune teller but can only remember that it was about a man who came out of the sea and then returned there, as he perhaps will do. Meanwhile, his tooth seems to regrow after it gets knocked out by an angry local on their arrival at the hotel where his crew have been sent for a free trip in lieu of severance when the factory they worked at is closed down. Ding Jianguo is one of a host of men cast adrift in the increasingly capitalist post-economic reform society and himself dreams of opening business.
Zhong films these sequences in a heavy grain that echoes 16mm and in a style that recalls that of the Sixth Generation. Its realism stands in stark contrast to the surreal composition and bold aesthetics of the modern day setting in which pretty everyone ends up wearing some variety of woolly hat in the shape of a marine creature. Yet the picture we see of North Eastern China is that of post-industrial decline. Ding had another reason to go to Shenyang in that someone had seen one of his videos in which he found an iron nail in a bit of discount sausage, spitting it out much like Ding Jianguo did his tooth, and claimed it belonged to their pet who had a knee operation shortly before going missing. Li Xin (Li Xueqin) thinks he’s her long lost classmate, and Ding Mao can’t actually remember if he is or not, but in any case she takes him to the site of a disused theme park. This place used to be thriving and prosperous, she says, but now it’s just overgrown ruins. She’s been trying to recreate a rollercoaster in sound with the help of some local children.
Ding Mao has also been hearing strange noises he’d like to get tot the bottom of. They sound sort of metallic with a bell at the end, a little like some kind of sea creature. He also comes across the mysterious fortune teller who gives him a special free gift and also tells him to find his father. While he has encounters with several other eccentric people including a Japanese picture book writer who has memories of being a tiger hunted by Japanese soldiers in a past life, but struggles to find a place for himself while trying to figure out what exactly happened to his father. Li Xin tells him of another shared memory, the time a shark was killed and there was a local furore about the rare chance to eat shark meat. All of these stories and memories eventually coalesce around Ding Mao as a kind of raucous rhapsody of China’s recent history. In a strange way, he is able to transcend this world and enter that of his father, though only as an observer. They remain on opposite sides of the glass unreachable to each other. Like the man in the story, Ding Mao has regained his memories, or perhaps come up with new ones, but can never be reborn into that world. A surreal odyssey through an oddly ethereal vision of deindustrialised China, there is a kind of poignancy in Ding Mao’s quest and search for meaning but also serenity as each of its disparate plot threads slowly coalesces into one.
Atlantic Rhapsody screens 16th/17th October as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.
Trailer (English subtitles)
