By Ela Bittencourt
Jia Zhangke, A Touch of Sin (2013)
Some of the most memorable films at this year’s New York Film Festival have been authored by Asian filmmakers. Chinese director Jia Zhangke, Taiwanese Tsai Ming-liang and South Korean Hong Sang-soo have all made strong returns to NYFF.
Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin (all films 2013) brings together disparate stories of ordinary people driven to violent acts. Zhangke doesn’t dwell on each character’s past, but rather depicts the circumstances surrounding the crimes. In one story, a laid off coalmine worker, Dahai, files a complaint against a village chief for selling collectively owned property and pocketing the profits. Threatened and humiliated, Dahai guns down not only those involved in corruption, but also a farmer viciously beating his horse. In another story, Zheng, a receptionist at a massage parlour, stabs a customer who abuses her demanding that she give him a massage even though she’s not a masseuse. Zhangke sprinkles a few key details to contextualize each crime: the dire poverty of Dahai’s family, and the mockery he suffers, Zheng’s break-up with a married man she’s been seeing and a confrontation with the man’s wife.
Zhangke dwells on the images of blood, showing them off in vibrant colours: the splattered windows of a corrupt businessman’s car after Dahai shoots him, Zheng’s pale skin and white shirt speckled with dark coagulated blots, a stained knife in her hand. Staging violence as if to suggest that it’s a perversion of the basic instinct for self-preservation, Zhangke brings up animal metaphors: Dahai’s tawdry jungle towel with a tiger print, in which he swaddles his rifle, or the slithering snakes, a metaphor for deceit, in Zheng’s story. In one image, a horse whose owner Dahai shot roams free, pulling an empty cart as police cars race to the murder scene.
The China that Zhangke portrays is vast and inhuman, a land with boundless opportunity for the ruthless, cunning few, and drudgery and exploitation for most. The image has proven harsh enough for the Chinese censors to delay the film’s opening in China. But Zhangke doesn’t merely take aim at the heavily industrial or the globalized world. What he poignantly presents is the clash between the far-reaching dreams that sudden prosperity may bring, and the bitter anger of those who lack the means to attain them. In one scene, two teenage workers at an upscale brothel catch up on the news via the girl’s Facebook page: There is a politician and her 300 Louis Vuitton bags, and there’s an explosion at Dahai’s coalmine, a clash of prosperity and easy consumerism with the coalmine’s dire working conditions. The young post their responses: ‘WTF!,’ an indignant cry, yet tempered by admiration, hinting at a reality in which money and power, be it lawful or criminal, captures enough of the young’s imagination to make it worth aspiring to, regardless of the price. Yet although Zhangke presents some of the violent acts as offering a momentary release, he doesn’t downplay their gravity. Poignantly, at the film’s end, he returns to Zheng, who has moved away from her province to seek a new life. As she walks past an old fort, a Chinese opera is being staged outdoors, with a scene where a murderess is questioned by a judge. ‘Do you understand your sin?’, the judge intones, startlingly reminding us of the moral code.
Tsai Ming-liang, Stray Dogs, (2013)
Where Zhangke focuses on China’s provinces, Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs draws us to the city, with its cold, increasingly spreading concrete sprawl. Unlike Zhangke’s characters, Tsai Ming-liang’s triplet of a father and two children remains abstracted, anonymous. The father earns meagre wages holding up an advertising placard at a busy intersection. Tsai Ming-liang sustains the shots of the father fighting to stand still as a strong winds blow him about. The camera zooms in slowly on the shivering body and the bloodshot eyes, dwelling on the body’s gradual breakdown. The children spend their days roaming the city, strolling the aisles of a local supermarket. The drabness of their living conditions – a hideout with cardboard walls, with clothing stuffed into random bags or strewn about, and routine showers in public bathrooms – are contrasted with the polished sheen and multicolored cornucopia of the supermarket. Here again is a vision of plentitude that’s beyond reach. When the children fashion a life-size doll using a cabbage for her head, the drunken father lunges at it – first with furious passion that betrays his sexual frustration, then with insatiable hunger, tearing the cabbage with his teeth.
Most striking in Tsai Ming-liang’s new film is his painstaking framing of shots and rapturous attention to architectural detail: the dripping, fungus-infested and scratched walls in the house of the supermarket worker, or the decaying abandoned apartment building, which hosts a haunting panoramic drawing of a mountain landscape. Tsai Ming-liang’s camera often stays low, bringing out foreground textures, while squashing the objects that are further away. With the camera tilted upwards and the truncated horizon, the human figures appear infinitely small. Meanwhile the unfinished landscape, of buildings built, as others are being abandoned, is so devoid of human warmth that nothing rekindle it.
Hong Sang-soo, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (2013)
In contrast to Zhangke and Tsai Ming-liang’s relentless portraits of indignity, Hong Sang-soo offers a quiet, inwardly focused picture of present-day disjointedness in Nobody’s Daughter Haewon. The film follows a few days in young Haewon’s life, recorded in her diary. Played by Jeong Eun-Chae, Haewon is beautiful yet gangly, wearing the same mannish shirt and wide-leg jeans in most shots. Living with her father, whom she never mentions, and separated from her mother who visits after five years only to leave again, this time for Canada, Haewon is indeed nobody’s daughter: she drifts, neglecting her studies as she dreams of an acting career, dozing in the library, or taking walks. Throughout, Haewon’s peregrination is both external and internal: as she relates her days and dreams in the voiceover, she struggles to come to terms with who she is. Having started an affair with a married man who’s her film professor, Haewon proves the more sensible of the two when she breaks off their relations. Yet she is also given to sudden flights of fancy, and after just meeting a divorced Korean man who lives abroad and is looking for a new wife, tells her friends that she might soon marry him.
Employing highly literary style, Hong Sang-soo refrains from overt social critique. There are, however, hints of unease. Haewon, who lived abroad as a child, is referred to by her friends as a ‘mixed-breed’ and ‘aristocratic,’ and her directness is deemed unsuitable to South Korea. Hong Sang-soo portrays Seoul as permeated by foreign culture, particularly the movies – Haewon recognizes in the street and hugs British actress Jane Birkin – yet, at the same time, insular. Sang-soo’s choice of locations contrasts the city’s historical statues and the Namhan Fort, itself a symbol of protection against foreigners, with bland, contemporary buildings. The film plays delicately on the idea that our feeling of timelessness, a deep connection to the past and to heritage, is at odds with our acute sense of mortality – our personal histories infinitely short compared to the cities that we inhabit. In Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, the past hasn’t been erased, but it figures into today’s imagination as a sentiment of things lost. For Haewon, this loss is also a loss of innocence: trying to live by her mother’s credo, ‘Living is dying … do whatever you want,’ Haewon discovers that absolute freedom, as well as truthfulness to oneself and to others, may come at a heavy price.