The irony at the centre of Zhang Yimou’s Under the Light (坚如磐石, jiānrúpánshí) is that it takes place in a neon-lit city of eternal visibility, though of course where you have light you’ll also find shadows. Even so, it appears he’s trying to make a point in the plain sight nature of political corruption and it’s connections with organised crime. At heart it’s a tense cat and mouse game between two men who share some kind of sordid past, but also of how it’s the next generation that often pay in the infinitely corrupted paternity of the contemporary society.
Zhang opens with a hostage crisis as a man hijacks a bus and threatens to blow it up if he doesn’t receive a visit from deputy mayor Zheng Gang (Zhang Guoli). Zheng attends but his policeman son Jianming (Lei Jiayin), currently assigned to the tech division, notices that the bomb can be detonated remotely and it doesn’t appear the hostage taker knew that it was real. In any case, all is not as it seems and as Zheng is soon squaring off against shady businessman Li Zhitian (Yu Hewei) who invites Jianming to dinner and puts on a show by blackmailing another business owner with a sex photo before forcing him to put his hand in boiling oil.
In contrast to his ruthless exterior, Zhitian dotes on his grown up daughter currently pregnant with her first child and about to be formally married to his business heir David (Sun Yizhou). Jianming meanwhile has a complicated relationship with his father by whom he feels rejected in part because he’s adopted. Zheng also appears to be meeting with a mysterious young woman for unclear reasons, later hinting that she’s a kind of daughter figure someone at some point asked him to protect. In a strange and probably unintended way, it’s this parental quality of protection that has been disrupted by ingrained corruption and is then re-channeled in a desire to protect society in general. When it’s all over, Jianming asks his bosses why they trusted him to make the right decision, and they tell him it’s because he told them he wanted to be a “true policeman” for the people.
Apparently stuck in limbo for four years because of censorship concerns, the propaganda thrust of the film centres on the crackdown against political and judicial corruption. Zheng is engaged in a political project to target corrupt officials but is heavily implied to be on the wrong side of the fence himself which would explain his connection with Zhitian, a supposedly self-made man who keeps a heavy pole in his living room to remind him of his roots as a lowly porter in a rural town before taking advantage of the ‘90s economic reforms to make himself wealthy beyond his wildest dreams.
They each have hidden secrets which Jianming becomes determined to drag into the light while working with the anti-corruption officers in his precinct, as well as old flame Hui-lin (Zhou Dongyu). Zhang adds in some distinctly retro comedy vibes not least in the frustrated romance of Jianming and Huilin who at one point dangle dangerously off a building while she later bites back, “don’t deprive me of the chance to protect you. It’s what they call love” when firing a pistol at a bunch or marauding bad guys. Yet the comedy seems incongruous with infinite bleakness of the resolution in which once again the children are made to suffer as Jianming comes to a greater understanding of his origins.
In an ironic touch, the villains are later revealed to have been dyeing their hair which is in reality already white though they are not really all that old. Playing into the themes of duplicity, it also hints at the central message that the older generation must recede and the young, like Jianming, learn to find an accommodation with their failures in order to reclaim a sense of justice. Then again, the film itself is quite duplicitous with a series of glaring plotholes including a giant one relating to the DNA identification of a missing woman whose body is finally dragged into the light. Huiling warns Jianming that there are some boxes it’s better not to open. At the film’s conclusion he may wish he’d listened, but his job is to drag truth into the light and not least his own. In any Zhang’s infinitely bright, ever illuminated city of neon and glass has a host of hidden darkness only temporarily exorcised by the unusually lengthy parade of the now standard title cards explaining that the wrongdoers were caught and punished while deprived of their ill-gotten gains no matter how much it might seem that crime really does pay.
International trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 