JIANG WEN (姜文): LET THE MOVIES FLY
35mm Archival Print! 2007
Director: Jiang Wen
Producer: Albert Lee, Jiang Wen
Screenwriter: Shu Ping, Jiang Wen, Guo Shixing
Cinematographer: Zhao Fei, Lee Ping-bin, Yang Tao
Production Designer: Cao Jiuping, Zhang Jianqun
Editor: Zhang Yifan
Composer: Joe Hisaishi
Cast: Jaycee Chen, Zhou Yun, Jiang Wen, Anthony Wong, Joan Chen
35mm, color, in Mandarin w/ English s/t, 116 min.
Jiang Wen’s third feature marks a bold visual and narrative turn from In the Heat of the Sun (1994) and Devils on the Doorstep (2000) with its fanciful, almost magic realist, depictions of five lives, interconnected by fate and destiny across different seasons, and regions. The film opens in spring in a small southern hilltop village in 1976 where a son studying accounting struggles to understand his increasingly flighty mother, who is prone to climbing the tallest tree near their home and shouting cryptic messages to her long missing husband. In this opening vignette, Jiang edges a diaphanous, eccentric tone with melancholy before sweeping us off to an eastern boarding school in the summer where an unsuspecting music teacher finds himself trapped in a web of sexual intrigue. Accused of groping a woman at a community screening of the revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women, he ends up subject to a surprisingly erotic police line-up.
As autumn descends, the film returns to the village setting of the first story and takes a darker turn as the music teacher’s friend and his wife begin political rehabilitation under the supervision of the young accountant. Jealousy and betrayal soon shatter the bucolic rhythm before Wen carries us off again, this time two decades earlier to a remote travelers’ camp, somewhere on the sands of the western desert, where everything, it seems, may have started. Throughout, Jiang orchestrates multiple registers and styles in a film that increasingly demands we approach it as a musical piece, until a final, culminating burst of enigmatic energy that seems to wrap everything up, even as it deepens the film’s central mystery. – Paul Malcolm
Introduced live by Jiang Wen via Skype
Jiang Wen graduated from the leading acting school in China, the Central Academy of Drama, in 1984. Leading roles in a series of landmark films by Fifth Generation directors, including Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987) and Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Li Lianying: The Imperial Eunuch (1991), quickly established Jiang as one of the biggest stars in China. He made his debut as a writer-director in 1994 with In the Heat of the Sun, and his follow-up film Devils on the Doorstep (2000) won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. His newest film as writer-director Gone with the Bullets (2014) is scheduled for release in China later this year.
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Sponsor(s): zConfucius Institute, Film and Television Archive, Part of the 2014 China Onscreen Biennial (银幕中国双年展) presented in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Hawaii. For more information, including the full program schedule, film descriptions, and ticket and venue information, please visit the website.