Tag: Mandarin

Moscow Mission (93国际列车大劫案：莫斯科行动, Herman Yau, 2023)

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In the early 1990s, China and Russia were each struggling to accommodate new political and economic realities. This is at least one reason offered in explanation for the nexus of crime that overtook the long distance train connecting the two capitals in Herman Yau’s action drama Moscow Mission (93国际列车大劫案：莫斯科行动, guójì lièchē dà jié àn Mòsīkē xíngdòng). Inspired by a real life train heist in 1993, the film suggests that China was pulling ahead free of the labour protests which appear frequently in Moscow amid the collapsing Russian economy but equally insists that the bandits must be stopped because they not only endanger China’s international reputation but its trading relations with the former Soviet Union.

In truth there’s no real reason given for the mysterious D’s (Huang Xuan) heinous crime spree save a later allusion to a troubled childhood and the sudden death of his sensitive musician father when he was only 13 (which would put it shortly before the end of the Cultural Revolution). In any case, those around him have more complex motivations such as those of Zhenzhen (Janice Man Wing-San), a former sex worker employed by the gang to identify wealthy passengers and inform the rest of the crew by note, who needs the money for a sick relative. In any case, nearly everyone on this train is concealing vast amounts of hard cash, mostly in their underwear. Not content with the money, D also stops to rape a woman who had resisted but was found with a large amount of money stuffed in her bra. 

In short, there’s nothing noble about D’s gang or any implication they’re rebellious outlaws just thuggish crooks taking advantage of a geopolitical vulnerability. Local fixer Vasily (Andy Lau Tak-Wah), however, is otherwise depicted as a victim of circumstance cruelly separated from a then newborn daughter for whom he is continually searching. He made his money digging a tunnel from Shenzhen to Hong Kong and using it to smuggle luxury goods in much the same way many now use the train as is evident by the scenes at Russian station when passengers suddenly start leaning out windows flogging pairs of jeans. Vasily’s in on that trade too, as well attempting to broker a deal for a wealthy man to buy a former Soviet fighter jet, but seems unhappy with his life of petty crime selling fake passports to dodgy people and also has an ongoing non-romance with Zhenzhen who is trapped in an abusive relationship with D’s brother-in-arms Zhiwen (Jason Gu Jiacheng). 

Intense police captain Cui (Zhang Hanyu) is dispatched to catch the train robbers and avenge China’s international reputation by bringing order to the train but also stumbles on another crime in progress in the Russian capital. He has an opposite number in Sergey (Andrey Lazarev), a former KGB now FSB officer who hints at a new world order if also at a society very much in flux. In some ways the film suggests Cui’s inevitable victory is aided D’s hubristic overreach and the cooperation of the Russians rather than his own powers as a Chinese policeman, but also that China will clean up after itself taking down a Chinese gang while technically on foreign soil and making sure they return to China for justice. 

Yau opens strong with the high impact sequence of the original heist as the camera first pans along the inside of the train before finding Zhenzhen and then rest of the gang, while otherwise continuing to escalate the action with a climax at an abandoned rocket base and then a final shootout at the train depot where the carriages must quite literally change the gauge to shift from the old Soviet railways to the modern China. The gang members may implicitly be among those who’ve lost out in the face of new economic realities, though aside from D’s possibly duplicitous musing on the life he might have led if his father had not died leaves them little justification for the cruelty of their crimes. Meanwhile, Cui’s justice is not implacable, taking pity on both Zhenzhen and Vasily and promising to treat them fairly in acknowledgement of their cooperation as opposed to D who had problematic gang members bumped off by the possibly the worst hitman in Moscow and has been using Vasily’s daughter to manipulate him for last few years with no certainly that he actually knows where she is. Making a minor point about empty consumerism in the constant references to stolen watches, Yau goes big on spectacle but also homes in on the smaller stories of trauma and displacement that eventually provoke it.

International trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

The Invisible Guest (瞒天过海, Chen Zhuo, 2023)

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Prestige mystery thrillers are definitely having a moment at the Chinese box office and like last summer’s Lost in the Stars, The Invisible Guest (瞒天过海, mántiānguòhǎi) takes place in a fictional South East Asian nation among a largely Chinese community where the policemen mainly speak English and almost everyone else Mandarin. Like many similarly themed films that might partly be because there is a strong suggestion of normalised judicial corruption which would otherwise be a difficult sell for the Mainland censorship board even if very much on message in its anti-elitist themes in which it is repeatedly stated that money cannot in fact solve everything. 

Adapted from a Spanish film which was a huge hit on its Chinese release and recently remade in Korea under the title Confession, the film opens as a locked room mystery. A well-known architect, Minghao (Yin Zhung), who is also the adopted son of the nation’s only Chinese lawmaker, has been brutally murdered in a luxury hotel. Joanna (Chang Chun-ning), the wife of a filthy rich real estate magnate, has been arrested but maintains her innocence. She claims that they were attacked soon after entering the room and that she was temporarily knocked out waking up to find Minghao with his throat cut, the attacker vanished, and police kicking down the door.  

The twist is that she’s then approached by Zheng (Greg Hsu), a local cop, who offers to “help” her for a small fee promising to sort out all the problematic evidence against her if only she’s honest with him about what really happened in the room. Obviously, the depiction of such an openly corrupt law enforcement officer would not be possible on the Mainland which explains the international setting but it soon becomes clear that Joanna may not be a very reliable narrator and Zheng obviously knows a little more about what’s really going on than he pretends.

Joanna had only recently married her superwealthy husband whose business interests have been very badly affected by the scandal, suggesting at least that she may be a patsy at the centre of a corporate conspiracy with her husband’s firm possibly hoping to get rid of her or someone else’s using her to get to him. But the most essential message is that the rich and powerful shouldn’t have a right to assume that everything can be solved with money and they can get away with anything so long as they have financial means to pay for it. In a flashback which we can’t be sure is completely reliable, someone suggests that the victim’s life was meaningless and killing them no different from crushing an ant, a view somewhat validated by Zheng when he tells Joanna that he isn’t interested in people like that only people like her, wealthy. 

Conversely, a tangenital victim of the case later insists that you shouldn’t underestimate what poor people will do for their families because in the end that’s all they have. The film is sympathetic to those like them who do not have the means to face off against someone like Joanna who probably could, if she is not actually innocent as she claims, evade justice thanks to her vast wealth and social standing assuming her husband’s company don’t decide to drop her in it. There is also, however, the implication that Joanna was once herself poor and downtrodden and has been corrupted by her desire for the illusionary freedom of wealth, abandoning her integrity while carrying the innocent dream of buying an idyllic orchard where she could live in peace and comfort. 

Playing out in near realtime, Chen keeps the chamber drama tension high with frequent on-screen graphics reminding us that Joanna only has a couple of hours left to clear her name before the dossier of evidence against her will be presented to the prosecution and she’ll be charged with murder. Zheng says he can help but keeps pressing her not only for more money but more information, the “real” truth, rather than a favourable narrative though arguably the flow of hypotheses made more sense in the context of a lawyer prepping a client than a policeman probing for evidence in order to neutralise it as did the accused’s willingness to trust the person poking holes in their story. A kind of justice, at least, is done and not least poetic as the truth begins to emerge though the guilty parties or invisible guests of latent classism and social inequality are very much here to stay. 

The Invisible Guest is in UK cinemas now courtesy of CMC.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Endless Journey (三大队, Dai Mo, 2023)

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The police officers at the centre of Dai Mo’s Endless Journey (三大队, Sān Dàduì) are soon stripped of their badges, accused of excessive force contravening laws existing since the medieval era to prevent vigilante justice. Yet in someways that’s essentially what they end up doing, extra-judicial investigators with a personal vendetta rather than a pure-hearted interest in justice even if the victim of the crime weighs heavily on their conscience. 

Though the film plays into the recent trend in Sino-noir and popularity of mystery thrillers at the Chinese box office, it is surprising that a film that is at least subtly critical of the justice system, featuring police who break the rules and are sent to prison, was approved by the censors board even if the central message is one of heroism as Captain Cheng (Zhang Yi) doggedly chases his suspect all over China for several years. Then again, the hero of this true life case turns out to be China itself as Cheng is reminded that his search is unnecessary given that the fugitive, Eryong (Zheng Benyu), is sure to be captured by the burgeoning surveillance network of CCTV cameras then being rolled out across the country. Years later, it’s the system that allows Cheng to identify Eryong as his DNA and fingerprints throw up positive matches within seconds of samples being taken thanks to the nation’s DNA database. 

Even so, as the veteran officer, Zhang (Yang Xinming), reminds the rookie behind every major case there’s a ruined family broken by their loss which is one reason why he doesn’t relish the prospect of investigating one so late in his career. This particular crime is so heinous that it’s become front page news which means that they’ve also got their boss breathing down their necks to get it solved as soon as possible with the existence of Division 3 itself on the line. Cheng pops home for a matter of minutes to check on his wife and daughter, shutting down his wife’s suggestion that they get a security system for their windows on the grounds that it would be an embarrassing thing for a detective’s home to have. The reason she wants one is that the victim in this case had been a little girl of around their daughter’s age unexpectedly home alone when thieves broke in by climbing over their aircon unit and smashing a window. Finding nothing of value they raped and killed the daughter. 

After a police officer dies as a result of the investigation, the squad take things too far questioning the first suspect leading to his death which is how they end up disgraced and sent to prison. After his release, Cheng has lost his family, his home, his job and identity as a protector of justice yet his determination to catch Eryong is born more of his desire to avenge a friend than it is to prevent further crime. His fellow officers join him in the beginning, but during the endless searching each make the decision to move on for easily understandable reasons such as their marriages, children, and illness but Cheng cannot let go even when prompted by an old friend from the force who tells him they have this in hand though there is perhaps a subtle implication that the police force isn’t really doing enough otherwise Cheng wouldn’t have to be chasing Eryong all over the country. 

But haunted by reflections of his own face, ageing, at times dishevelled and hopeless, Cheng is also searching for himself and a means to reclaim the self he once was by vindicating himself as a policeman along with Division 3 in finally completing their mission. The ominous score by Peng Fei with its stinging strings adds to the noirish feel as does the perpetual inevitability of Cheng’s forward motion in the dogged pursuit of his prey, unable to rest until Eryong has been brought to ground. His quest robs him of his life, but there is an undeniable poignancy to it in Cheng’s inability to find himself outside of the chase only to be left with a moment of uncertainty no longer sure who he is or where he goes now, left alone and with no sense of direction in the absence of his quarry.

Endless Journey is in UK cinemas now courtesy of CMC.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Redemption with Life (兄弟, Zhang Wei, 2023)

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A young man with old-fashioned values is slowly consumed by the contradictions of the modern China in Zhang Wei’s indie drama, Redemption with Life (兄弟, Xiōngdì). The Chinese title translates as the more straightforward “brothers” and hints at the strong bond between the three men at its centre who each find that life has not turned out quite as they hoped. While one silently plugs away, another pushes the boundaries of the law, but the third allows himself to be pulled into callous inhumanity and the exploitation of the dreams of others while working for an enigmatic businessman running what is quite obviously a dodgy pyramid scheme. 

As the film opens, Jianhua has just been released from a two-year prison sentence after taking the fall for the financial impropriety overseen by his boss, Li Gang. He is met by his two sworn brothers, fellow bikers Peng and aspiring photographer Shaofeng, and is intent on starting over described by Peng as some kind of financial hotshot though it’s surprising he would even be able to return to that line of work after being imprisoned for mismanagement. In any case, he ends up returning to Li Gang while justifying himself by using the vast amounts of cash he’s been given to repay victims who lost their life savings when the bottom finally fell out of the Ponzi scheme they’d been running. 

Though his youthful dream was to travel the world, Jianhua is materially ambitious and ties his masculinity to his ability to become wealthy. After starting a relationship with a female biker, he gets deeper into the scam telling her that he wants to make enough money for them to go travelling while otherwise claiming not to be interested in the high life of fancy parties and expensive goods that Li Gang represents. She eventually leaves him because he caused her to feel insecure with all his dodgy dealings though he repeatedly fails to learn his lessons thinking he can solve all of his problems with money. Some debts must be repaid, he solemnly intones, yet as Peng reminds him there are some things that can’t simply be compensated for and some money you just shouldn’t make if causes you to act immorally.

Peng had given his dream as making a lot of money and seems to look up to Jianhua because he works in “finance”, but is otherwise happy enough with the life he’s made for himself running a motorbike garage which is mostly honest work except that he makes extra money by selling smuggled bikes to other bikers. He wants to help Jianhua but worries that he’s already in over his head and unable to escape the allure of his old life. Shaofeng meanwhile is financially stable and pursuing his art on his own terms, turning down an offer Jianhua gets him to work with some top gallery owners because on one level he knows if Jianhua’s involved it’s not legit and on another wants to do things his way even if he’s unsuccessful. 

Skipping back and forth over a number of years encompassing time served in prison the film chronicles Jianhua’s corruption and eventual disillusionment in the realisation that he too is being scammed by Li Gang and his futile attempts to make money with money are forever doomed to failure. The suggestion is that he wants the high life he wanted to reject in order to secure his masculinity in a world now more ruled by the corporate even if this kind of corporatism is itself ruled by violence and vulgarity, not to mention a healthy dose of misogyny and female exploitation. Jianhua’s partner in crime, the similarly deluded Haitao, eventually renounces desire altogether and becomes a Buddhist monk to atone for the destruction his lust for riches wrought on those around him, though Jianhua’s solution is one of old-fashioned manliness that is predictably futile. Slowly, the biker convoy makes its way towards Tibet and a more spiritual place supposedly freer of the destructive consumerism that has already consumed Jianhua and ruined the lives of those he convinced to invest in a scheme he always knew was a scam not to mention morally wrong. A mild critique of the contemporary society ruled by status and acquisition the film’s advocation for an unconstructed masculinity may sit uncomfortably but does nevertheless make the case for a beneficial brotherhood over mutual exploitation. 

Redemption with Life screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Eye of the Storm (疫起, Lin Chun-Yang, 2023)

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In the early days of the pandemic, Taiwan was thought of as kind of safe haven which had largely managed to keep the disease a bay allowing many to live their lives more or less normally while much of the rest of the world contended with intermittent lockdowns of varying severity. The reasons for their success are said to lie in their experience during the SARS crisis of 2003. 

To that extent, there’s a kind of eeriness in Lin Chung-Yang’s poignant drama Eye of the Storm (疫起, yì qǐ) in watching the early days of this present pandemic play out 20 years earlier as medical personnel attempt to deal with a new illness about which they know almost nothing save that it appears to have a frighteningly high mortality rate. As the film opens, self-involved surgeon Xia (Wang Po-chieh) is clocking off a few minutes early in an attempt to make it to his daughter’s birthday party, rudely brushing off the complaints of warmhearted male nurse Tai-he (Tseng Ching-hua) and dismissing requests from his colleagues. Leaving in a taxi, however, he’s soon called back to deal with an emergency operation and becomes trapped when the hospital is placed into lockdown after the report of a possible SARS case. 

Unlike so many dramas centring on frontline healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, :Lin does not necessarily portray the medical staff in the best light. As the suspected case was being treated in B Wing it is the first to be shut down and some of the doctors and nurses start a protest refusing to treat patients with SARS resentful that they’ve been locked up with the disease. Meanwhile, in A Wing some of the nurses also go on strike holing themselves up in the rec room and refusing to come out. As Tai-he had been helping out in B-Wing, he is quickly rejected by his peers and exiled there despite having no symptoms while the nursing staff otherwise know that they maybe condemning him to death in sending him to the frontline battle against the disease.

Also on the frontline is journalist Yu-zhong (Hsueh Shih-ling) who snuck into the hospital after a tip off and is determined to let the people know by capturing the chaotic scenes at the hospital first hand. He and Xia eventually end up going through old records to figure out how the virus took hold while Xia mainly spends his time hiding in a storage cupboard and trying not to come into contact with anyone who might have SARS which is not very doctorly. Though originally desperate to get out of the hospital, Xia’s mindset begins to change when he sees how bad things are in B Wing after being charged with transporting food supplies while he later comes to realise that he may bear some responsibility in the rather cavalier treatment of a patient he recently operated on.

Then again, perhaps there is something also a little on the nose in the constant references to the disease’s origins in China while it’s the hospitals choice to use a Mainland construction firm that directly leads to the infection. In any case, Xia eventually beggins to come around realising that it’s selfish of him to refuse to help when the hospital is already so short staffed with some medical personnel on strike and others already falling ill and even dying. Lin lends the tunnel connecting the two wings an eerie quality in the ominous opening and closing of its oversize doors, as if Xia were really descending into hell dressed in a makeshift hazmat suit of yellow overalls. 

Xia had appeared to be a narcissistic surgeon with little interest in his patients. Criticised by Tai-he he clapped back that it’s the nurse’s job to care for them, not his, while continuing to keep his distance and fixating on being allowed to leave the hospital before beginning to empathise with the sick. Yet many other medical staff react in a similar way, overwhelmed by the fear and chaos of the situation while resentful in feeling that they’ve been unfairly imprisoned only later coming to accept the situation and returning to caring for the patients as best they can. Eerily echoing our present times, Lin’s poignant drama eventually finds a kind of serenity even among so much panic in quiet moments of small victories and human solidarity.

Eye of the Storm screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Netflix trailer (English subtitles)

The Shadowless Tower (白塔之光, Zhang Lu, 2023)

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A tale of middle-aged loneliness and regret, Zhang Lu’s Shadowless Tower (白塔之光, Bái Tǎ zhī Guāng) takes its name from a white pagoda in the centre of Beijing that is said to cast no shadow. Or at least, as the hero later suggests, its shadow may be far away in its old home town of Tibet. Most Zhang’s protagonists are somewhat displaced most particularly spiritually and existentially, cut adrift by corrupted paternity while uncertain how to progress towards the future. 

For Gu (Xin Baiqing), a former poet now a melancholy restaurant critic and divorcee with a small daughter, the problem is he’s beginning to feel more and more like the father he hasn’t seen since he was five when his mother kicked him out of the house after he was accused of groping a woman on a bus. In a meta-textual touch, Gu’s kite-flying father Yunlai is played by film director Tian Zhuangzhuang who once made a film called The Blue Kite that is also about failed fatherhood and was banned by the authorities on its release. In any case, Gu is only a part-time father to his little girl, Smiley (Wang Yiwen), who is living with his sister and her husband who has been secretly in touch with Yunlai and aware that he rides hundreds of miles by bicycle twice a year visit Beijing on the kids’ birthdays though he cannot meet them.

In many ways, it might seem to be the father, or at least the image of one, that is the shadowless tower that hangs over Gu’s life. He fantasies about interrogating him over the bus incident, wondering if what his mother did was right or if they unfairly rejected a good man because of a misunderstanding. His mother’s anger was apparently partly because Yunlai would not compromise and confess to the crime to get a lighter sentence, instead being sent to a labour camp which left her financially responsible for the children on her own. Gu’s sister Wenhai (Li Qinqin) reflects that if he had not been such a good father to begin with she could have forgiven him, but because he was his disgrace caused her to lose faith in the world. 

Gu seems not to have much faith in the world either, remarking that he separated from his wife owing to an excess of politeness, the same politeness that keeps him aloof from his surroundings and prevents him from making meaningful connections. Yet for all that, he embodies a kind of fatherhood, sitting down on the bed of his lodger and gently placing a hand on his back on hearing his crying through the wall. The young man later embraces him as a son to a father, while Gu finds himself dancing a melancholy waltz with Yunlai who is also an image of his future self. 

But even as a lifelong Beijinger, Gu remains rootless. Meeting up with old friends, all of whom might have been young in the late ‘80s, they drink and sing the song composed for the 2008 Olympics as if they were looking for a father in the city. Gu also reads from Bei Dao’s My Beijing which similarly rests on a sense of exile even while present. The only woman in the group laments that she never married and meditates on the ghost of lost love, while the only one of them who fled abroad eventually takes his own life in a foreign land.

Jolting him out of his inertia, Gu encounters free spirited photographer Wenhai (Huang Ya) who shares his sister’s name though she is also similarly displaced and struggling with a more literal orphanhood that leaves her caught between the North East and the Cantonese-speaking south where she was adopted. A gentle love story arises between them, Wenhai cutting through the wall of Gu’s politeness with refreshing frankness but also with troubles of her own and a worrying tendency to refer to him as her father which nevertheless has a kind of circularity to it. 

Crouching down by the pagoda, they can’t see their shadows either and wonder where they are. Then again, perhaps it’s not so much that tower casts no shadow, but the shadow it casts is so vast that covers everything below just as Gu’s searching for his father overshadows his life even as he is also searching for himself. Intensely moving, Zhang’s poetic drama waxes on middle-aged rootlessness but also the interconnectedness of all things, from kites to earthworms and the great dance of life in all its inescapable loneliness. 

The Shadowless Tower screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

Original trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

Eat Bitter (Pascale Appora-Gnekindy & Sun Ningyi, 2023)

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“Happiness is not about what you eat or what you wear but mutual understanding” according to Luan, a Chinese construction manager, in Pascale Appora-Gnekindy & Sun Ningyi’s documentary Eat Bitter. Mutual understanding is perhaps something he’s striving for in his working life in the Central African Republic which is as the opening titles state one of the poorest places on Earth. As China deepens its economic investment in Africa, Luan is one of many who’ve travelled overseas in search of higher salaries to provide better lives for their families.

His struggles are mirrored in those of Boa, a local man who works a sand diver gathering the raw materials that Luan needs for his construction work. Boa’s wife has recently left him with their two children whom he can barely support, though as it later turns out that may partly be because he had conceived a child with another woman whom he subsequently tries to marry only to see the relationship fail when she regards him as unkind and can no longer live with him. Luan’s status as a migrant worker has also placed a strain on his family life. Having left when his son was a teenager, he worries that he wasn’t there to effectively parent him at an important age which has contributed to the difficulties his wife is currently facing in her relationship with him. Luan and Yuzhen talk every day on the phone and she generally seems upbeat but later makes an attempt on her life in the depths of her loneliness being separated from her husband and estranged from her son. 

The film’s title comes from a phrase that Luan utters close to its conclusion that one must eat bitter before tasting sweet, meaning that in order to find happiness one must endure hardship. But then the hardships that he and Boa are facing are obviously very different. Luan is here to build to a bank, a slick and modern building that symbolises a new future for an otherwise impoverished country which might be one reason the president wants to come in person to inaugurate it with an election looming along with the rise of a new militia threatening civil war. While working on the project, Luan complains that the local workers are slow in comparison to the speed and efficiency common in China while it’s clear that health and safety concerns are almost non-existent. A large group of men standing on a skinny girder joke that they’ll die if they fall but no one is wearing helmets or other safety gear. At one point it’s suggested that they were provided but the workers opted not to use them. In any case, a local worker is eventually killed due to a fall on site causing Luan to reflect that he should have made helmets mandatory and has perhaps failed in his duty of care to the casual workers he employs. 

Boa says his job is dangerous too and that he’s caused himself injury due to being preoccupied with his complicated domestic situation. His dream is to buy a canoe and go into business for himself, something which his current boss supports and even offers to help him with even if the sand diving business appears to be semi-legal and precarious. The authorities soon close down the site where Boa and the other men were gathering sand and gravel stating that they want to redevelop it but when the boss returns sometime later he discovers that nothing has been done and wonders why they had to be moved on. 

Later Luan and his wife attend the opening of a new apartment building for a banquet hosted by his hitherto unseen boss Madame He but it seems unlikely that many of the local residents would be able to afford to live in a place like this even if like the bank it is intended as symbol of what the Central African Republic could become rather than what it is now. Asked for his opinion on the Chinese, Boa states that he feels they’ve got a raw deal. The Chinese are just like white people, he remarks, they say they’ve come to help but they earn a lot more money and the terms of the deal are disadvantageous to men like him. Perhaps this is an ironic inversion of the mutual understanding Luan was talking about though admittedly more in reference to his now much happier relationship with his wife who has finally agreed to relocate in order to be with him. In any case, it’s true that both men are intent on building a mutually beneficial future even if it’s one where the scales are very much tipped. 

Eat Bitter screened as part of this year’s DOC NYC.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Eye for an Eye: The Blind Swordsman (目中无人, Yang Bingjia, 2022)

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A blind swordsman takes revenge against the evils of feudal society in Yang Bingjia’s impressively helmed action drama, Eye For An Eye: The Blind Swordsman (目中无人, mùzhōngwúrén). Set in the “lawless” society of the Tang era following the Tianbao rebellion, the film has a western sensibility with its twanging guitar score and dusty roads not to mention jumped up gangsters trying to get a foothold in the legitimate order simply because they have become too powerful and no one is willing to resist them. 

Ni Yan (Gao Weiman), a young tavern woman who lost her brother and husband when her wedding was attacked by the Yuwen clan asks for nothing more than “justice” but that’s something no one can give her. Wandering swordsman Cheng Yi (Mo Tse) who’d taken a liking to her because she offered him some of her wine and even gave some to his horse reports the crime to the local magistrate after claiming the bounty on a fugitive, only he tells her directly that he will do nothing because the Yuwen clan have already moved beyond justice and not even he will touch them. 

In a way, Cheng is depicted as a failed revolutionary and his blindness a symbol his despair in a world he no longer cares to see. A bounty hunter by trade, his work is facilitated by old comrade Lady Qin (Zhang Qin) who, in contrast to him, seems to live a cheerful life repairing musical instruments while much loved in the town around her. Though they pretend to be saving money for an operation to restore Cheng’s sight, their line of work is perhaps cynical in taking advantage of the times while accidentally outsourcing a justice the authorities can no longer provide in the weakened Tang society. The Yuwen have infiltrated most institutions and cultivated relationships with important people that allow them to ride roughshod over ordinary citizens who are now completely at their mercy.

There might be something quietly subversive in these references to a corrupt and authoritarian institution which tries to brand Ni Yani the criminal in her pleas for justice, insisting that she admit to killing her brother herself in resentment of his criminal past while he is also hunted by the Yuwen because he knows to much about their dodgy dealings including raiding tombs to get precious gems to use as bargaining chips in a dynastic marriage negotiation. Cheng Yi did not originally want to get involved, himself too cynical and having given up hope of “justice” in this “lawless” society, but finds himself sympathetic towards Ni Yan because of the kindness she showed him and the obvious suffering her ordeal has inflicted on her. 

In a sense, his eyes are opened to the injustice of the society around him to which he had been wilfully blind if ironically accepting that he will never see again. He alone is willing to stand up to the Yuwen while even within their ranks petty resentments are growing as a princeling grows ambitious to escape his own oppression at the hands of an authoritarian brother who berates him for his weakness. 

Despite the budgetary issues which often plague straight to streaming cinema, Yang’s elegantly lensed drama brings a real sense of place to the dusty provincial towns where Cheng plies his trade along with the ornate elegance of the realm of Lady Qin whose flowing robes belie her military past. Drawing inspiration from the western as well as Japanese genre classics such as Yojimbo the film presents a world in decay in which the wandering swordsman becomes a moral authority, delivering justice if for a price. The irony is that it isn’t money which opens his eyes, but the reclaimed ability to see with his heart in deciding to help Ni Yan in her quest to avenge the deaths of those close to her. A series of excellently choreographed and well-shot action scenes along with Yang’s post-modern take on the material lend this tale of wandering swordsmen and feudal abuses a sense of the legendary that hints at further adventures for wandering sword for hire Cheng Yi bringing his own brand of justice to a lawless place. 

Eye for an Eye: The Blind Swordsman is out in the US on Digital, blu-ray, and DVD on 28th November courtesy of Well Go USA.

US trailer (English subtitles)

Into the Shaolin (在少林, Sun Hongyun, 2023)

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Like many of the monks at the centre of Sun Hongyun’s documentary Into the Shaolin (在少林
zài Shàolín), our associations with the name are almost exclusively tied up with martial arts movies. Yet as they discovered on entering the temple, it’s not all about kung fu which to some at least came as a disappointment when they were still novices tasked with performing ordinary chores. Then again, many of them do not necessarily anticipate being monks all their lives and so long spent in contemplation leaves them with few other ways to support themselves in the secular world other than through leveraging their martial arts training.

As we can see, many monks come to the temple in childhood often to escape poverty or because they were thought to be troublemakers at home. Sun follows the little monks with empathy, capturing both their mastery over the craft at such a young age and the pain and difficulty it often causes them raising series ethical issues over whether it is right and fair to expect so much from small children who often cry in pain or frustration. Others also remark that they miss their parents having essentially been sent away though one boy explains that his mother managed to get a job nearby so that she can still spend time with him and observe his training.

It’s these familial ties that present the strongest contradictions to the monks and bind them more fully to the secular world. One young man who came to the temple for lack of other options contemplates remaining there for the rest of his life and is a little resentful that even at 18 he still has to get the permission of the grandparents who raised him to go on a mountain retreat. The grandparents, who lost their son, his father, in a workplace accident they believe caused by overwork, want nothing more than for him to get married and start a business and so they flatly refuse to allow him to go on being a monk forever instructing him not to bother contacting them again if that’s what he plans to do. 

But then as others have said, being a shaolin monk doesn’t teach you how to live in the secular world and gives you few transferable skills that would allow you to support yourself. An older monk explains that most of the monks who came to the temple at the same time as him have left but almost all still work with martial arts in some capacity as there’s nothing else for them to do. Even so, the little monks talk of doing other things with their lives once they grow up one hoping to become a soldier defending China and another a movie star. Many came to the temple specifically because of their love of kung fu films starring Jet Li, Donnie Yen, or Wang Baoqiang who himself trained in Shaolin martial arts. 

Others meanwhile have found serenity in the rhythms of the temple and may no longer be suited to living outside of it. The show the boys are preparing utilises a series of boxes of the kind they usually sleep in which as one monk admits to the untrained eye closely resemble coffins but as he puts it no one really needs much more space than their body naturally occupies and it doesn’t really matter where they sleep. Of course, to those in the secular world those things mean a great deal and there’s probably a big difference between a box at the temple and one on the street. Another monk reflects on the shaolin name which means “few trees” though at the temple few is a lot and less is more. He thinks that it’s a fallacy to consider a “return” to the secular world because the true “return” is to your true self which you only discover by leaving home. 

That might be a sentiment shared by a Serbian doctoral student staying at the temple while researching her thesis and in particular the concept of “Chan”. Offering her own insights as a foreigner living at the temple she reflects on the differing attitudes to nature found in China while she seems to be the only woman currently in training. She remarks that it might be odd to call a temple home but that’s what it’s been to here even as she prepares to leave it. Sun’s documentary has an ambivalence to it, at once admiring of the monks in their asceticism, but also somewhat sad not only for their inability to escape their suffering, merely exchange one kind for another, but also for the predicament they my find themselves in should the time come to leave the temple whether by their own will or otherwise.

Into the Shaolin screened as part of this year’s DOC NYC and is available to stream in the US until Nov. 26.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Crocodile Island (巨鳄岛, Simon Zhao & Xu Shixing, 2020)

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Monster movie streamer Crocodile Island (巨鳄岛, jù è dǎo) became a surprise hit in the early days of the pandemic as people increasingly preferred to entertain themselves at home, though of course in a way it may be somehow comforting to see people battle more obvious threats that they can actually see and physically resist. In any case, the film never promises much more than its nature as fodder for online streaming would suggest while admittedly pinching plot elements from other similarly themed movies such Train to Busan and positioning the central conflict as effective paternity rather than the monster itself.

A brief prologue finds American pilots flying through the Dragon Triangle during the Second World War while ominously carrying cargo labeled as containing dangerous radiation though the reason they later crash on an uncharted island is that they are suddenly attacked by what appear to be pterodactyls. Nevertheless, the radiation is later given as an explanation as to why all the creatures on the island have evolved into huge and terrifying monsters including the titular crocodile.

Flash forward to the present day and grumpy middle-aged man Lin Hao (Gallen Lo Ka-leung) is escorting his estranged 19-year-old daughter Yiyi (Liao Yinyue) home to China following the sudden death of her mother in Australia where the pair had been living. Yiyi has secretly been accompanied by her university student boyfriend Cheng Jie (Wang Bingxiang) of whom Lin clearly does not approve, not yet able to shift his perspective on the daughter he hadn’t seen in five years to realise she is no longer a little girl. Family bonding will however have to wait as the plane they’re travelling on alongside a pregnant lady and her husband, an influencer, and an obnoxious man travelling home for a heart transplant, is pulled into Dragon’s Triangle by magnetic interference and crash lands on the island where several of the survivors are quickly swallowed by the crocodile. 

Those who remain are therefore faced with a series of dilemmas as to whether to help each other or prioritise their own survival with Cao Fang (He Qiwei), the heart transplant candidate, actively pushing several of his fellow passengers towards the crocodile so that he can get away. Lin meanwhile quickly takes charge and is more or less unchallenged as they try to explore the island in search of clues hoping that the radio equipment in the ‘40s plane they read about in a diary one of the pilots left behind will allow them to make contact through the outdated tech of radio waves. 

This is might be something of a plot hole seeing as it obviously didn’t work for the American pilot though perhaps there just weren’t any ships in range given the circumstances, and it seems he too might have come to a sticky end. But thanks to his sudden promotion to father of the group, Lin begins to reassess his role as a father to Yiyi in beginning to cede ground and actually listen to some of her ideas along with accepting support from Cheng Jie to help him protect her not lease because he realises he may not survive. There are also a few other giant and very hungry monsters on the island who in this case turn out to be more of a threat than other people who with the exception of Cao Fang are more community minded than individualistic. 

A mild social message is conveyed through Yiyi’s eventual discarding of the cigarettes she secretly smoked, symbolising the end of her rebellion and the re-acceptance of her father along with his patriarchal authority as if shifting back onto the right path thanks to the experience of fighting a giant crocodile together and realising that he really did stay to protect her instead of just going off on his own. Some undeniably ropey special effects and a general lack of coherence in the film’s internal logic frustrate its ability to maintain momentum though English-speakers aside, the performances are strong even if the plot developments at times feel unoriginal. Even so the film sells its message of family reunion and perhaps less palatably patriarchal social conventions as Lin Hao steps up to protect his daughter and community from the threats that surround them be they giant crocodiles or otherwise.

Crocodile Island is out now in the US on Digital & DVD courtesy of Well Go USA.

US release trailer (English trailer)