Tag: Wang Jingchun

New Life (我会好好的, Dong Hongjie, 2025)

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A lost young woman begins to find new purpose in life after taking in a stray dog in Dong Hongjie’s tearjerking drama, A New Life (我会好好的, wǒ, huì hǎohǎo de). A tribute to the healing power of a dog’s unconditional love, the film is partly about the grieving process and learning to let go, but also about what it’s like to feel abandoned and hopeless. Having something to look after gives Xiaoman (Zhang Zifeng) a reason to look after herself as well as her heartbroken father who’s turned to drunken rages in the wake of his wife’s death and subsequent loss of his business.

Ironically, Zhao Bujin’s (Wang Jingchun) old wood carving shop has been taken over by a vet, though Bujin can’t seem to let it go and is intent on causing trouble there. Having lost her mother due to an illness, Xiaoman is intent on not taking up her place at university and instead is earning money as a removals driver often helping to clear houses after the death of the owner. It’s during one particular job that she’s confronted by an angry dog who refuses to leave a cardboard box where, a neighbour explains, it stayed with its mother until she died. Ever since then, he’s been unable to get out, much like Xiaoman who also remains trapped within the box of her grief.

Identifying with the dog, she begins to worry about him during a rainstorm and decides to rescue him as a means of rescuing herself. But at the same time, she doesn’t really want to keep him and continues referring to the dog as “doggie” rather than naming him while he imprints on her as a new maternal figure. There’s a half an idea in the back of her mind that there might be money in it if she cleans the dog up a bit and sells him on with the help of the vet, Chuan (Zhang Zixian), who promises to help her find a good home for it. The first couple he suggests appear to be extremely wealthy and keen to adopt, but the film seems to be critiquing the idea that a life of material comfort is better than one spent struggling with family. The wealthy couple clearly have ideas about their ideal dog and how it would fit into their Instagram-worthy life including a name that skews feminine while Xiaoman’s dog is a boy. Predictably, the couple eventually send it back when it fails to bond with them and insists on returning to Xiaoman. 

Then again, Xiaoman and her father don’t necessarily seem to be struggling all that much. Though they don’t have much money, they’ve managed to keep their sizeable home and furniture even they’re economising on food and worrying about how to make ends meet with Bujin unable to find work. Xiaoman attributes this to his drinking, though it seems he actually sustained an injury he never got treatment for which has damaged his ability to carve. In any case, his industry has also changed. Though Xiaoman is led to believe he’s found a well-paying job at a factory producing wooden statues, she later learns that he’s being paid a pittance to do an apprentice’s job doing things like prepping wood. His friend explains that only elite master carvers make money these days because all the lower grade stuff is all mass-produced by machine so there aren’t any jobs for mid-grade craftsmen like Bujin. Bujin keeps on about finding an amazing log he’ll use for his masterpiece, but like so much in his life it seems like an impossible pipe dream.

Meanwhile, Xiaoman tries to keep it together with her only goal being to buy a proper grave for her mother overlooking ocean. Nevertheless, bonding with the dog, whom she later names Xiaoyi as if it were really her brother gives, her new reasons to look after herself and think about her future. Identifying with it closely, she also comes to realise how little people value the lives of cats and dogs and by extension other people too. That’s one reason why she begins holding proper funerals for pets to give them a little dignity in death when some owners just tell the vets to get rid of their remains and don’t even bother to collect the ashes. Adopting a quasi-maternal position in caring for Xiaoyi also helps her process her own mother’s death and begin letting her go so that both she and her father can start to move on. Truly tugging at the heartstrings, Dong’s film is a tribute to the unconditional love of a dog and the healing effects it can have on a life if only someone is willing to offer it the same in return.

Trailer (no subtitles)

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

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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)

Ode to the Spring (没有一个春天不会来临, Zhou Nan, Zhang Chi, Dong Yue, Tian Yusheng, Rao Xiaozhi, 2022)

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There isn’t any denying that the last two years have been extremely difficult for everyone all around the world. Multi-strand “main melody” drama in praise of frontline workers Ode to the Spring (没有一个春天不会来临, méiyǒu yī gè chūntiān bùhuì láilín) may in itself be slightly optimistic in that its perspective is clearly one assuming that the worst is over and the pandemic is largely a thing of the past. Ironically the film’s release, previously scheduled for April, had to be delayed until the early summer because of rising cases in Mainland China. Nevertheless, its messages of hope and the importance of community have lost none of their power while the film’s willingness to admit that some things could have been handled better, even without expressly stating by who, is surprisingly subversive. 

Structured as a multi-strand drama rather than a traditional omnibus movie, the film follows five groups of people mainly in Wuhan at the beginning the outbreak. The first story revolves around a young man, Nanfeng (Yin Fang), whose relationship with local florist Xiaoyu (Zhou Dongyu) had become strained by his decision to move to Shanghai to earn more money for their future. As the New Year Spring Festival approaches, he returns to Wuhan in an attempt to patch things up oblivious of the new disease engulfing the city. Xiaoyu and her mother, who had not approved of him, have each been hospitalised but were separated in the chaos and are now in different hospitals with no way to stay in touch. In a mild rebuke to modern day consumerism, the message that Nanfeng is forced to learn is that he should have been thinking how best to support his community rather than leaving to make more money in Shanghai. Running all around town looking for Xiaoyu’s mother, he eventually wins her approval but is simultaneously warned that he is too impulsive and should think more about what it is others actually want rather than giving them what he thinks they should have. 

Meanwhile a pair of migrant workers struggle to make a living but are given a load of face masks and told to sell them in Wuhan. They too are little aware of how bad things have already become. The older of the drivers is rebuked by his wife because he hasn’t come home in several months and his daughter is beginning to forget him. Though they become increasingly afraid of infection, the truckers maintain their compassion helping an elderly lady and her granddaughter, whose parents are already in a quarantine centre, get to a hospital and then deciding that perhaps they shouldn’t be trying to profit from the pandemic no matter their own desperate circumstances. 

Then again, the film is surprisingly frank about the supply problems in the hospitals which have already run out of high grade medical masks while medics are close to burn out. A doctor is forced to sleep in his car because he’s technically on call. His wife, a nurse, chooses to join him rather than stay in the hotel room they’ve been provided while their son is cared for by his grandparents. He calls a man to tell him his father has passed away and ask for additional documentation to release the body, but the grieving son is himself in a quarantine centre as are all the other family members who have so far survived. The inability to save a fellow doctor who was shortly to become a father almost breaks him, while his wife wonders what’s to become of their son if they should both fall ill. Despite having scolded the boy on the phone about not doing his homework, the doctor has recorded a poignant voice message for his son just in case letting him know that he bought him the toy he wanted for his birthday and has been paying attention even if it didn’t seem like it at the time. 

The themes of parental separation echo through each of the stories, Xiaoyu is separated from her mother, the trucker cannot return to his family because of the lockdowns and his precarious financial position, and the doctor is staying away from his son to treat the sick. In the final strand, a naughty little boy obsessed with legendary child warrior Nezha is separated from his doctor mother (Song Jia) who is despatched to Wuhan to help with the relief effort while his father (Huang Xiaoming), unused to taking care of him, is preoccupied because he unwisely invested in buying a bus he cannot now use because no one is allowed to go anywhere. The boy dreams of visiting a local Buddha statue and getting him to “awaken” from his “quarantine” to show the virus who’s boss only for the Buddha to let him take on Nezha’s form to stamp on those nasty viruses so his mum can come home.

Similarly, the head of a local neighbourhood committee struggles to deal with complaints about a young woman playing piano at all hours while left home alone because her mother is a doctor staying at the hospital. Mr. Wang (Wang Jingchun) becomes something of a local hero, selflessly caring for the residents of a series of apartment blocks ensuring they get food deliveries and dealing with disputes. When he comes down with a fever and has to isolate, the whole block turns out their lights in support waving the torchlight on their phones like tiny stars shining in the distance. It’s here that the film’s real message lies in praising the value of community, not just the doctors and frontline health workers but the civil servants who kept everything running and the ordinary people who did their best to follow the rules and stay at home, while also hinting at some of the failures in the response from the random veg that keeps turning up at the depo to lack of PPE and the total disregard for the migrants stuck far from home in the midst of an economic collapse. Shot by five directors, the strands each have idiosyncratic flare from the chaotic handheld of the hospital scenes to the gentle romance of Nanfeng’s quest and the cheerful adventures of the would-be-Nezha but are otherwise of one voice in the film’s consistent messaging of mutual solidarity and praise for frontline workers. 

Ode to the Spring opens in UK cinemas on 8th July courtesy of CineAsia.

International trailer (English subtitles)

So Long, My Son (地久天长, Wang Xiaoshuai, 2019)

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So long my son poster 1“Time stopped moving for us a long time ago” the hero of Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Long, My Son (地久天长, Dì Jiǔ Tiān Cháng) sadly intones, a melancholy relic of another era lightyears away from the gleaming spires of the new China. Following two families over thirty years at the close of the 20th century, Wang’s film, perhaps unlike those of his contemporaries, is not so much quietly angry as filled with tremendous sadness and an unquiet grief for the things which were taken from those who found themselves betrayed by an unforgiving, rigidly oppressive regime.

In the early 1980s, two boys, brothers in all but blood, sit by a river. One is too timid to go in because he cannot swim, while the other, irritated, tries to coax his friend with the promise that they will stay by the shore and he will be there to protect him. Sometime later, we see that a boy has drowned, his parents running fast towards the hospital with the body in their arms but all to no avail. This single event, just one of many ordinary tragedies, is the fracturing point in lives of six previously close friends whose easy, familial relationship is instantly shattered by unspeakable guilt and irresolvable shame.

Liu Yaojun (Wang Jingchun) and his wife Wang Liyun (Yong Mei) have lost their only son, Xingxing, but as someone later points out he needn’t have been their only son if weren’t for the oppressive and needlessly draconian One Child Policy. Haiyan (Ai Liya), the mother of the other boy Haohao and wife of Yaojun’s best friend Yingming (Xu Cheng), rose quickly in the party hierarchy following the end of the Cultural Revolution, becoming ambitious and seduced by her own sense of power. On learning that Liyun had become pregnant with a second child, she marched her friend to the hospital and forced her to undergo an abortion during which Liyun almost died and was left infertile.

The couple lose both their children in the same room, passing underneath the single character for “quiet” that tries to silence even their grief in the face of such cruelty. Silence comes to define their relationships with their former friends who are by turns unsure how to speak to them in the wake of intense tragedy, and fully aware of their complicity. Yaojun and Liyun forgive all. Having lost their own son they only want the best for Haohao, hoping that he is young enough to simply forget the incident and go on with his life, but as the older Haohao later says the guilt became like a tree inside of him that grew as he grew. The silence, more than the guilt or the sorrow, destroys their friendship and makes reconciliation impossible.

Betrayed again, Yaojun and Liyun are two of many laid off from their previously guaranteed government factory jobs following the market reforms of the late ‘80s. To escape their grief they exile themselves to Fujian where they know no one and do not speak the dialect. We discover that they live with a rebellious teenager named Xingxing and wonder if somehow their son survived only to realise later that they have adopted an orphaned boy in a misguided attempt to replace the child they lost. Divided by their grief and frustrated hopes, Yaojun and Liyun grow apart. He drinks to escape his intense resentment towards his powerlessness in an oppressive society, while she yearns to repair their broken family but fears that Yaojun has already moved away from her.

Meanwhile, the modern China leaves them behind. Yingming starts a business and becomes a wealthy man, while Yaojun struggles on with a small repair shop. The couple return to their hometown and the flat they once lived in to find it exactly as it was when they left, improbably surviving while the rest of the factory complex has long been torn down. The statue of Chairman Mao is still there, but now he stands incongruously outside a giant shopping mall offering ironic comment on China’s rapid progress towards rampant capitalist consumerism. Haiyan, filled with shame and remorse, seeks reconciliation near the end of her life, but as others point out no one blames her for doing her job – she was a victim of the system too, if perhaps a willingly complicit one who allowed fear and need for approval to overrule her sense of humanity. Those were dark days in which one might be arrested and perhaps killed just for dancing. Following emotional rather than temporal logic, Wang’s non-linear tale bounces through 30 years of history as its stoic protagonists attempt to endure the cruelty of their times, but eventually lands on a note of hopeful restitution in which the “Everlasting Friendship” is finally restored and the family repaired, the silence broken and time in motion once again.

So Long, My Son was screened as part of the 2019 BFI London Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Climbers (攀登者, Daniel Lee, 2019)

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The Climbers poster 1“Because it’s there” George Mallory famously said when questioned why exactly he wanted to climb Mount Everest. The hero of Daniel Lee’s The Climbers (攀登者, Pāndēngzhĕ) who regards Mallory as his idol has a slightly more reasoned response when similarly questioned by a student, pausing before explaining that humans are always eager to climb towards the future. That will prove to be a rather ironic statement in that Fang Wuzhou (Wu Jing) is a man in many ways trapped by past injustice, unable to move on from simultaneously achieving his dream and being denied its glory.

Narrated by meteorologist and Wuzhou’s innocent love interest Xu Ying (Zhang Ziyi), the action begins in 1960 when the Chinese National Mountaineering Team makes an attempt to conquer Everest from the North Face in response to a territorial challenge from the other side. During the ascent, the team’s captain is killed leaving the three remaining members to press on to the summit alone. Having conquered the mountain, they are unable to record their achievement because they lost the camera during an avalanche and so their success goes unrecognised by the international community. This is particularly bad news for Wuzhou whose intensely romantic attempt to woo shy meteorology student Xu Ying is interrupted at the critical moment by the news they’ve been denied and all their dreams are dashed. Wuzhou becomes sullen and withdrawn, resentful at being thought a fraud. The failure costs him the courage he had mustered to pursue his romantic destiny, allowing Xu Ying to leave for many years of research in the Soviet Union without telling her how he really feels.

Xu Ying’s commentary opts for understatement when it briefly remarks that the nation entered a period of “darkness” following the “failure” of the Everest attempt after which the Chinese National Mountaineering Team was disbanded. Wuzhou is relegated to the boiler room in a factory while his surviving friends, Jiebu (Lawang Lop) and Songlin (Zhang Yi), pursue their separate destinies, Jiebu returning to his sheep farm and Songlin, whose foot was ruined by frostbite, joining a sports training facility. By 1975, times have changed and the powers that be see fit to mount another attempt on Everest in order to measure it “properly” and restore China’s international mountain climbing reputation.

For all that The Climbers is a propaganda epic filled with calls to “show the world what Chinese men can do”, it has its share of flawed heroes failing to measure up to a vision of themselves as fearless champions of their nation. Wuzhou is understandably an embittered man obsessed with the rejection of his first summit, but he’s also an emotional coward who ties the need to have his success validated with the right to speak his heart to the improbably patient Xu Ying who apparently continues holding a torch for him throughout her long years in Russia, only implying she can’t wait for him any longer by putting their relationship on a professional footing when she arrives to lead the meteorological department on the 1975 summit attempt. Nevertheless, the pair share an array of meaningful looks filled with poignant longing while Xu Ying laments the presence of the mountain which stands between them before seemingly deciding to sacrifice herself for Wuzhou’s dream in the forlorn hope of finally conquering it.

Songlin, meanwhile, is resentful not so much towards the mountain or the fact that he will never be able to climb it again but towards Wuzhou who saved his life and let the camera fall, thereby bringing shame on the Chinese nation. Later, a brave young man opts to sacrifice his life to ensure the camera’s survival, and as Songlin later comes to understand the climb is a heavy responsibility which puts young lives at risk for a fairly meaningless prize which may not bring the glory to their nation that the young men and women trying to reach the summit might expect. Nevertheless, they plough on regardless. 1960 leads to 1975, and then to 2019 in which intrepid Chinese climbers once again attempt to conquer Everest in the company of a (in some ways not terribly) surprising star cameo in order to reemphasise the nation’s manly prowess and overwhelming desire to protect what it sees as its territory. Lee makes the most of the snowy vistas for a series of death defying stunts as the team (repeatedly) encounter avalanches, rock falls, and dangerous storms, risking all to bring glory to China but remaining resolute in their determination to make it all the way to the top.

The Climbers is currently on limited release in UK cinemas courtesy of Cine Asia, and in the US from Well Go USA.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Shadow (影, Zhang Yimou, 2018)

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Shadow poster 1Zhang Yimou waxes Shakespearean in a tale of palace intrigue and a world out of balance in his latest return to the age of wuxia, Shadow (影, Yǐng). Drawing inspiration from classic ink paintings, Zhang’s monochromatic world has a chilling beauty even in its intense layers of oppression which make prisoners of king and subjects alike. Like the yin yang diagram on which the climatic battle takes place, Shadow is a tale of dualities and oppositions as its hollowed out hero begins to wonder who exactly he might be without the mirror.

Long ago in feudal China, the Kingdom of Pei has been living in peace thanks to an “alliance” with the Yang who are technically occupying the former Pei city of Jing. Many in the Kingdom of Pei are unhappy with this arrangement, regarding the loss of Jing as a humiliation and the king’s refusal to retake it more cowardice than pragmatism. Despite the king’s instruction that the truce must be maintained and war avoided at all costs, his trusted commander has undertaken a secret meeting with Yang in which he has agreed to a personal duel for the honour of Pei. The king is very unhappy. A lesser man might have lost his head, but the king needs his commander. What he doesn’t know, however, is that the commander is not all he seems. Nobleman Yu (Deng Chao) was badly injured during a previous fight with Yang and has retreated to the catacombs while his double, Jing (also Deng Chao), has been playing his part in court.

Jing, “saved” from poverty as a young child brought to the palace as a double for Yu, is grateful and loyal. He respects his masters and has trained hard to learn the skills needed to pass as a nobleman and more particularly as Yu. As such he has no “identity”. Even his name was given to him by his master and is simply that of the town where he was found which happens to be the disputed city itself. Jing does everything right – his instincts are good, he is clever and quick-witted with a talent for intrigue, all of which makes him both a danger and a shield for Yu. Yu, meanwhile, trapped in the same underground cell which used to house Jing, has become warped and embittered. Nursing a mortal wound, he plots and schemes against the king, scuttling goblin-like as he rails against his fate.

Yu promises Jing a release from his mental imprisonment if he agrees to take part in the duel with Yang. Jing knows that Yu’s promise is hollow and that he is not intended to survive, but submits himself to his fate anyway. He does this, partly, in hope but also because of his longstanding but unspeakable love for Madam (Sun Li) – Yu’s wife, who is one of the few people ever to express pity for his miserable circumstances. As the film opens, Madam and the king’s sister are reading proverbs together including one which insists that men are meant to rule. The king, however, is weak – he is effete and prefers the art of the brush to that of the sword, while his sister is “wild” – a bold and impetuous young woman seemingly more suited to the throne than her foppish brother.

As if to complete the theme, it’s Madam who eventually reveals the technique to beat Yang to her increasingly crazed husband. In order to defeat his hyper masculine enemy who fights with a giant sabre, Yu resolves to fight like a girl armed with one of Pei’s iconic parasols reconfigured in sharpened iron. Only by creating balance can they hope to win, meeting the weight of Yang’s blunt force with a lightness of touch and feminine elegance. 

The world of Shadow is one defined by its dualities – male/female, lowborn and high, betrayal and loyalty, arrogance and supplication. Jing’s existence is defined by that of the “true” commander – a shadow cannot exist without a form to cast it, or so it had always been thought. Offered the possibility of escape, Jing’s original identity begins to resurface. Yet his victory over his “other self” is also a defeat which infects him with the dubious moralities of the court, allowing him to become more than himself alone and leaving the world once again dangerously unbalanced. As the opening narration told us, however, it is not Jing, or Yu, or the king who hold the fate of Pei in their hands but Madam whose final decision will dictate the course of history. Set in a world of oppressive greys broken only by the driving rain and shocking redness of blood, Shadow may not return Zhang to the balletic heights of the poetic Hero, but does its best to add Shakespearean grandeur to its tragic tale of fractured identities and conflicting desires.

Screened as part of the 2018 BFI London Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)