Tag: Zhou Yiran

Flaming Cloud (三贵情史, Liu Siyi, 2023)

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Regrets can turn into curses too, according to a melancholy middle-aged woman in Lin Siyi’s beautifully designed romantic fable, Flaming Cloud (三贵情史, Sānguì qíng shǐ) The English title refers to the deaths of gods and goddesses and a physical harbinger either of the joy of reunion or the sorrow of parting. Of course, in one way it’s all the same, every hello is also a goodbye and a curse can also be a blessing depending on how you look at it. 

As the narratorial voiceover explains, the heavens is where all of this starts as bored gods in a casino on a cloud place bets on the lives of mortals. A young woman approaches and places a wager on the existence of true love which is immediately countered by the bar’s musician. To carry out the wager, the gods decide to curse the then baby Sangui that anything he kisses will fall into a deep sleep until he kisses his one true love. 

A kind of reverse sleeping beauty, the film follows Sangui’s path through a fairytale world where he meets various others suffering in similar ways to himself but is otherwise regarded as an outcast because of unusual ability to put people to sleep. A young woman, Yuyu (Zhou Ye), who thinks he might be her prince, introduces him to a “witch” who promises to cure his curse if only he’ll treat her chronic insomnia in which he’s had not a drop of sleep in the last 12 years. What he discovers is that she is not a witch at all but the faded star, Yuexin (Yao Chen), who tells him that she cannot cure his curse for there is nothing really wrong with him and some might even see his ability as a gift, especially those like her who have trouble sleeping. 

Yuexin’s insomnia is born of past regret and the pain of lost love. She can’t sleep because she lacks the courage to face her past, while Sangui too is afraid unable to search for the girl he believes to be his one true love whom he met in childhood in case she has forgotten him or like everyone else regards him as a “freak”. Yuexin warns him that if he never gains the courage to look for Tingting (Zhou Yiran) he may regret it in time and that regret could become its own kind of curse. But in the fairytale society of White Stone he discovers only more prejudice and cruelty, stumbling on a hidden factory staffed by enslaved workers who describe themselves as being, like him, “freaks” unlikely to be missed by the world above. The villain is an exploitative factory owner whose business model is dependent on their forced labour though a mysterious ally has been helping them by smuggling medicine through the steampunk pipes that puncture their environment. They alone stand up to the factory owner, insisting that the workers are “no different” from themselves and defiantly resisting the authoritarian austerity of a wicked stepmother turned capitalist fat cat. 

But the film’s Chinese title reminds that this is a story of Sangui’s love and whether his curse can be lifted or not. Yuexin realises that the choice she made may have been mistaken, while the musician who bet against the existence of true love later admits he did so because he knows it’s real but the reality is painful for him or else he just wanted to see it proved and send a message to his own lost love that they would one day meet again. Even so, that doesn’t necessarily mean there will be a happy ending. The course of true love is always bittersweet and whichever way you look at it destined to end in a farewell though that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth following and not doing so out of fear is as Yuexin discovered only to suffer from the curse of regret. Featuring exquisite production design from the opening animation to the whimsical fairytale town gleefully melding eras from Yuexin’s flapper-esque costuming to the 1950s aesthetic of the factory owner’s wife and the steampunk quality of factory itself, Lin Siyi’s charming romantic fable is as much about middle-aged regret for the forgotten dream of love as it is about finding the courage to seek it out no matter the risk. 

Flaming Cloud screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

My People, My Country (我和我的祖国, Chen Kaige, Zhang Yibai, Guan Hu, Xue Xiaolu, Xu Zheng, Ning Hao, Wen Muye, 2019)

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My People My COuntry poster 3Oct. 1, 2019 marks the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. Supervised by Chen Kaige, My People, My Country (我和我的祖国, Wǒ hé Wǒ dě Zǔguó) presents seven short films by seven directors featuring several notable historical events from the past 70 years though not quite one for every decade (perhaps for obvious reasons). Though different in tone, what each of the segments has in common is the desire to root these national events in the personal as they were experienced by ordinary people rather than how the history books might have chosen to record them.

Told in roughly chronological order, the film opens with the founding of the Republic as comedian Huang Bo plays an eccentric engineer charged with ensuring the operation of an automatic flag pole doesn’t embarrass Chairman Mao at the big moment. In the context of the film as a whole which is fond of flags, this is rather odd because every other flag in the film is raised by hand usually by a soldier taking the responsibility extremely seriously. Yet the point is less the flag itself than the symbolic pulling together of the community to find a solution to a problem. Realising the metal on the stopper is too brittle, the engineers put out an appeal for more with seemingly the entire town turning up with everything from rusty spoons to grandma’s necklace and even a set of gold bars!

This same sense of personal sacrifice for the greater good works its way into almost all of the segments beginning with the story of China’s first atom bomb in the ‘60s for which a pure hearted engineer (Zhang Yi) first of all sacrifices his one true love and then the remainder of his life when he exposes himself to dangerous radiation all in the name of science, while in the film’s most charming episode a young boy is devastated to realise his crush is moving abroad and has to choose between chasing after her and fixing up a TV aerial so his village can see China beat the US at volleyball during the ’84 Olympics. Visions of flag waving glory eventually convince him where his duty lies, but his sacrifice is later rewarded twice over as he becomes a little local hero even if temporarily heartbroken in the way only a small boy can be.

Then again, some people are just a little self-centred like the hero (Ge You) of Ning Hao’s Welcome to Beijing who keeps trying to reconnect with his earnest teenage son only to end up connecting with a fatherless young boy during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Chen Kaige’s sequence, meanwhile, is inspired by the story of two earthbound astronauts but similarly finds two roguish, orphaned young men connecting with a patient father figure who is able to bring them “home” by showing them a space miracle in the middle of the desert, and in the final and perhaps most directly propagandistic sequence, a tomboyish fighter pilot eventually overcomes her resentment at being relegated to a supporting role to rejoice in her colleagues’ success. Despite the overly militaristic jingoism of the parades with their obvious showcasing of China’s military power, Wen Muye’s “One for All” is in its own sense surprisingly progressive in its advancement of gender equality and mildly subversive LGBT positive themes were it not for a shoehorned in scene featuring a milquetoast “boyfriend”.

Sensitivity is not, however, very much in evidence in the sequence relating to the extremely topical issue of the Hong Kong handover. Out of touch at best, the constant references to the continuing reunification of the One China are likely to prove controversial though admittedly those they would most upset are unlikely to want to sit through a 2.5hr propaganda epic celebrating the achievements of Chinese communism. Nevertheless, it is a little galling to see the “return” to China so warmly embraced by the people of Hong Kong given current events in the city. This perhaps ill-judged sequence is the most overt piece of direct propaganda included in the otherwise unexpectedly subtle series which, despite the flag waving and eventual tank parade, tries to put the spotlight back on ordinary people living ordinary lives through the history of modern China. Of course, that necessarily also means that it leaves a lot out, deliberately refusing to engage with the less celebratory elements of China’s recent history, even as it closes with the fiercely patriotic song of the title performed by some of the ordinary heroes who have inspired its various tales of everyday heroism.

Original trailer featuring Faye Wong’s cover of the well known patriotic anthem from 1985 (no subtitles)