Tag: Zhang Benyu

Like A Rolling Stone (出走的决心, Yin Lichuan, 2024)

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A middle-aged woman’s decision to walk out on her abusive marriage and pursue a life of ultimate freedom on the road went viral in 2022 making her an accidental feminist icon in an overwhelmingly traditionalist and patriarchal culture. Yin Lichuan’s dramatisation of Su Min’s life, Like a Rolling Stone (出走的决心, chūzǒu de juéxīn), makes plain the various ways in which her life has been shaped by patriarchal forces that also continue to shape that of her daughter who is sympathetic to her mother’s plight but also perhaps still feeling herself entitled to her mother’s sacrifice while wary of making such a sacrifice herself.

As she says, Hong (Yong Mei) has been waiting a long time. A flashback to 1982 finds her as a fresh-faced teenager with hopes and dreams who wanted to go to university and travel the world. But her father pulls her out of school and forces her to work in a factory to support the family while devoting all their resources to her brother. She marries Dayong (Jiang Wu) to get away from her father’s oppression, chasing another kind of freedom but soon finding herself disappointed. In the present day we can see that Dayong is cruel and abusive. He continually runs Hong down, calls her stupid and lazy, and becomes violent when challenged. 

Hong has long wanted to leave but is prevented firstly by a sense of shame in going against conventional wisdom. When she’d tried to leave him before, her family refused to help her and in fact encouraged her to return to Dayong and put up with her mistreatment. Dayong had also frustrated her attempts to work so that she would have nowhere to go and no way of supporting herself if she left him while simultaneously taking advantage of her financially. The couple had separate finances since early in their marriage, but while Dayong doesn’t like Hong spending on things that make her happy, he often helps himself to her possessions declaring that everything belongs to the family. 

But Hong bites her tongue and does as she’s told because that’s what she’s been taught she’s supposed to do. She’s sacrificed all of herself for her family and has even been working unpaid for her brother for over three years only to see him become surly when she eventually asks for her backpay. Her daughter, Xiaoxue (Wu Qian) resents her father for the way he’s treated Hong and is supportive of her liberation but at the same time she also over relies on her asking her to cancel a trip to see her old friends to be around during her pregnancy and then again when first loses and then gains a better job but is afraid to ask for time off in case it ruins her chances of being kept on.

Hong asks her own mother why she treats her the way she does and continues to prioritise her brother while telling her must allow herself to be exploited to serve the family but she doesn’t have an answer for her. There’s certainly a greater understanding between Hong and Xiaoxue about the patriarchal structures in which they are both trapped. When she loses her job, Xiaoxue’s husband encourages her to stay home with the children just as Dayong had discouraged Hong from looking for work. Xiaoxue wants a job to avoid her mother’s fate of becoming trapped within the domestic environment with no time for herself. While her husband seems nicer and treats her better than Dayong has treated Hong, he is not necessarily that much better and still operates on a patriarchal mindset. He praises women for being superhuman, but in doing so suggests that the domestic sphere is a woman’s concern alone. It does not seem to occur to him that he could do his fair share or that the division of their labour could be more equal. 

Things may be better for Xiaoxue which was all that Hong wanted, but they are far from perfect and when push comes to shove she too just expects that her mother will sacrifice her own desires to suit Xiaoxue’s needs. Everyone keeps telling her to wait, but Hong waited to escape her father, to meet a “decent” man, for Xiaoxue to grow up, get married, and have children of her own, then for the children to start kindergarten. If she doesn’t leave now, there’ll be another reason why shouldn’t. There is something quite empowering about Hong’s gentle progression towards achieving her freedom beginning with getting her driving license in her 50s despite the misogynistic banter of the instructors. When she gets her car, Dayong immediately gets into the driver’s seat and it takes a little longer for her to assume her space, but as she says no one can stop her now. She won’t be bullied or belittled anymore, nor will she allow herself to be taken for granted or guilted into sacrificing herself for others who rarely sacrifice anything for her. One of a recent series of films addressing ongoing patriarchal oppression, Lin’s film is itself a way of fighting back against the idea that unhappiness is something you just have to accept as a woman as Hong begins living her best life out on the road, finally free and very much in the driving seat of her own life.

Like A Rolling Stone screened as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Good Autumn, Mommy (尋她, Chen Shizhong, 2023)

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A family tragedy forces a grieving mother to confront the sexism and hypocrisy of mid-90s China in Chen Shizhong’s biting rural drama, Good Autumn, Mommy (尋她, xún tā). Quietly simmering with an internal rage her society convinces her she must repress, Fong-tai (Shu Qi) finds herself constrained by the intensely traditional atmosphere of her small-town home and more than that by her husband’s eternally passive attitude in which he resolutely refuses to rock the boat or make any attempt to stand up for himself. 

Fong-tai is warned by her brother, in a nice way, that her personality may make it difficult to live somewhere like this where a woman is clearly intended to know her place and keep her peace. Not that she particularly blames him for it, but Fong-tai is resentful towards her birth family who fostered her out and saved their money to send her brother to university. For this reason she remains an outsider in the village (a sentiment rammed home by the casting of Taiwanese actress Shu Qi whose accent quite clearly stands out in Cantonese-speaking Guangdong) and not least because of her feisty temperament and tendency to speak her mind. 

Often, however, it does her little good. Pregnant with her second child she begs her mother-in-law to take her to a modern hospital but she insists on doing everything the old fashioned way taking both her and her similarly pregnant friend Lam San to a disused clinic only to be trapped there by an encroaching storm. Both babies are born healthy, but battered by the high winds the dilapidated clinic collapses plunging them into the lake. Fong-tai manages to save one but the other disappears without trace. As she had put a bangle on her newborn child and the rescued baby doesn’t have one, she assumes it’s Lam San’s but later comes to doubt herself. 

Part of the problem is that Fong-tai assumes no one is really looking for her baby because it is a girl and if it had been a son they’d have left no stone unturned. As her desperation mounts, many of those around her imply that the loss of her daughter is a kind a kind of blessing for, as the couple have one daughter already, it frees them up to try again for a son given the restrictions of the One Child Policy which allowed a second child if the first had been a girl. One even tells them that a second daughter kills off the family name given that Fong-tai’s husband Yiu-cho was also an only son, and that they should simply have another child as soon as possible to produce a male heir. 

Ironically this might also be why Kong-yan, Lam San’s husband, is prepared to accept the rescued baby as his own and reluctant to submit to a DNA test given that in that sense it doesn’t matter as much whether or not he is the biological father because this child is not expected to continue his line in the same way a son would be. Yet Kong-yan also embodies another side of a changing China in that he has become rich under the new economic reforms but largely by exploiting local sugar cane farmers. Kong-yan leverages his wealth in insisting Fong-tai pay for the DNA test knowing full well she can’t and then refusing to buy any of her sugarcane out of pettiness thereby destroying her livelihood. 

While looking for her daughter and frightened enough to take note of an urban legend about wild men living in an old banana plantation, Fong-tai is confronted with the borders of her world after venturing to the edge of it and discovering a construction site she had no idea existed because she doesn’t venture out of the village. She begins to wonder what the outside world is like and if she’s been trapped here by outdated notions of filiality and patriarchal social codes that conspire to keep women in their place while becoming sick of Yiu-cho’s complicity and refusal stand up for their family even when it’s their child that is missing. 

When she decides to drain the supposedly sacred lake herself by destroying the dam it’s as if she’s pulling down the borders of that world and removing the source of her oppression in breaking free of “tradition”. The villagers that were hostile to her just minutes before, begin to reflect that it’s just a lake and sympathise with Fong-tai as a bereaved mother rather than a troublemaker who didn’t know her place. Highly critical of ingrained sexism and the hubristic behaviour of the nouveau riche elite in changing 90s China the film’s haunting yet hopeful ending suggests at least that Fong-tai was able to ensure that her older daughter was freer than she had ever been even if she can never escape the wounds of the past or regain what was taken from her.

Good Autumn, Mommy screens in Chicago April 13 as part of the 18th Season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (Simplified Chineses & English subtitles)

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)

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)

Pegasus (飞驰人生, Han Han, 2019)

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Pegasus poster 1Traditionally speaking, New Year has often been a time for reconsidering one’s life choices, but can it ever really be too late to make up for past mistakes and charge ahead into a better future? The hero of Han Han’s New Year racing drama Pegasus (飞驰人生, Fēichí Rénshēng) is determined to find out as he tries to bounce back from disgrace and failure to prove to his young son that he was once a great man and not quite the hangdog loser he might at first seem. His battle, however, will be a tough one even with his best guys by his side.

Zheng Chi (Shen Teng) dreamed of racing glory and won it. He was a champion, the face on billboards across China, but a minor scandal put paid to his success and his driving and racing licenses have been suspended for the last five years during which time he’s been humbled and lived a workaday life as a fried rice stall vendor raising a young son alone. Now that his suspension is up for reconsideration, he’s beginning to wonder if he might be able to return to his rightful place at the centre of the podium but he’ll have to eat a considerable amount of humble pie if he’s to convince anyone that he’s a person worthy of respect now that he has nothing.

Director Han Han is, among other things, also a rally driver himself though his positioning of the sport within his tale of middle-aged loserdom is a slightly awkward fit. Racing is an expensive hobby, it quite literally relies on the involvement of those who have vast resources of disposable cash they can use to sponsor drivers so they can improve their equipment. Though a driver’s skill, and their relationship with a co-driver, are not insignificant parts of the equation, it is nevertheless true that money rules all when it comes to buying advantage (perhaps much like life).

Chi’s problem isn’t just his age, but that he’s up against extremely rich young guys with inherited wealth like his rival Zhengdong (Huang Jingyu) – a pretty boy with celebrity following and seemingly infinite resources. Han sets Chi’s struggle up as one of the chastened everyman – someone who came from nothing and made it only to crash and burn but still has the desire to get up and try again. He struggles on through various obstacles including bribing a driving instructor to get his licence back and charming a suspension board into letting him back in the game but discovers that friendships formed when successful might not survive a fall from grace. He can’t get the same kind of access as he could when he was riding high and no amount of chutzpah will make up for the disadvantage incurred through not having the kind of wealth that enables Zhengdong’s ongoing rise to glory.

Nevertheless, perhaps Zhengdong is simply a realist when he advises those looking for absolute fairness not to bother getting involved with racing. He’s not a bad guy, if somewhat insecure in feeling as if his own success has been enabled only by Chi’s fall from grace and perhaps he wouldn’t be top of the podium if the best driver hadn’t been hounded off the track. What we’re left with is an awkward admission that what makes the difference is men like Zhengdong deciding to feel philanthropic, though in this case he does so out of a sense of sportsmanship and a not entirely altruistic desire to prove himself by ensuring the participation of a worthy rival. Given this boost, Chi’s quest necessarily leaves the realm of the everyday loser and returns to the rarefied one of success enabled by privilege.

The final messages are also somewhat ambivalent in their death or glory, live full throttle intensity as Chi’s lectures on driving become lectures about life, affirming that those who win are the ones who drive fastest while making the fewest mistakes. Chi is not unencumbered, he has his son and therefore a responsibility to another which is sometimes forgotten in his own quest for glory which, we are reminded, carries risk and danger. Perhaps what we’re asked is if the gentle pleasures of a simple life selling fried rice for decades are worth giving up the hyper acceleration of a life measured in seconds following a dream. Chi might have found his answer, but it comes at a cost and he’s not the only one who’ll be paying it. As New Year messages go, it’s a decidedly mixed one which might not offer much positivity for the average middle-aged loser longing to relive their glory days in service of a dream which might long have flickered out in an increasingly unequal society.

Currently on limited release in UK cinemas.

Original trailer (English subtitles)