By Chi Tung and Brian Hu
UCLA's Mainland China film series is too huge a burden for one man (or woman) to bear. So we assigned our He Said, Chi said team to scoop two of its heavyweight features: Lu Chuan's Kekexili and Xu Jinglei's Letters from an Unknown Woman.
What's It All About? (A Brief Synopsis of Kekexili: Mountain Patrol)
Set during the mid '90s, Kekexili: Mountain Patrol tells the tale of the deadly battles waged between the poachers -- who have their sights set on Kekexili's endangered antelopes -- and the group of mountain patrolmen who'll stop at nothing to punish them. A hotshot journalist is employed from Beijing to join the latter group and see what makes them tick. Thus begins a tireless pursuit for justice; in the process, lives are sacrificed, sandstorms are braved and the boundaries of investigative reporting are blurred forever.
What's It All About? (A Brief Synopsis of Letters from an Unknown Woman)
A man receives a batch of letters revealing that a mystery woman has loved him all her life, and that despite embarking on several love affairs, the man does not have any recollection of them during subsequent encounters. What ensues is a series of flashbacks documenting the various points in their lives which intertwined, and the woman's lifelong quest to be loved by a man who barely knows she exists.
Chi,
In trying to do a "summation" of observations and reflections on the first week of mainland Chinese films at the UCLA Film/TV Archive, I've realized that the series isn't lending itself easily to a common theme or aesthetic, which is something new in western programs of "world cinema." I take this as a healthy sign that we in America have come to recognize that national cinemas need not be homogenous; in fact, they rarely are -- it's just that we're normally limited to films of a very specific (read: eurocentric) notion of what film art ought to be. That means that as individual critics, we need to be ever open to points of views other than our own. As a result, I think the best way to cover this film series is as a series of short pieces and dialogues through a team of critics, rather than a monolithic master essay trying to control the often dissenting voices emerging in contemporary Chinese cinema.
I want to discuss with you one trend that I have observed in the series, embodied by Lu Chuan's Kekexili: Mountain Patrol and Xu Jinglei's Letter From an Unknown Woman, which is the use of genre conventions to depict "serious" issues in contemporary China and to create opportunities for the film to be consumed by paying consumers who may not care for an "artier" aesthetic. Lu's film can be called a thriller, but I'd rather say that Lu mobilizes elements of the thriller in trying to draw attention to poaching in Tibet. Xu does a similar thing with melodrama in her film. This trend is certainly, in my opinion, a healthy one; when I mentioned the titles to some mainland friends, they immediately recognized them, something I can't say about Taiwanese art-cinema and Taiwanese audiences. Just take the idea of Kekexili: we follow the true story of an armed militia which pursues a team of antelope poachers in Tibet. It's a fabulous concept for a film, in terms of both politics and aesthetics, since this tale of ecological and religious pursuits explores topics that expose how one-sided our knowledge of such issues in China tend to be, while the blistering Tibetan sands deliver awe-inspiring panoramas and an existential stage of human conflict. Yet, often the thrill of the chase diverts us from the point. Worse, the form's tendency toward good and bad binaries (despite Lu's occasional stabs at shattering them) seems to reinforce the Han race (symobolized by the Beijing reporter who hopes his story will "solve" Tibet's problems) as the dominant and active force.
Telling the story through an outsider's perspective isn't inherently wrong; however, the film, especially in its prologue and epilogue, centers on the journalist's role in bringing justice for the Tibetans, who never seem that interested in accepting his help. In many ways, the Han journalist is to Kekexili as Brad Pitt is to Seven Years in Tibet: a friendly, comforting face through which we as outsiders can enter the film. Furthermore, my feeling is that the "based on a true story" label (which is a staple of genre films, whereas art films have a completely different relationship with "reality") makes the film's progressive intentions something of a moot point: as a result of the journalist's news stories in the late '90s, the Tibetan area was turned into a wildlife preserve. That hardly means that China's environmental woes can be put to rest. Sure, international viewers are now conscious of the past ecological and religious plights to save the then-endangered Tibetan antelopes. Now what?
Your thoughts?
-Brian
Brian,
You're right to question the disingenous premise behind Kekexili -- it's a true story much in the same way that the Blair Witch Project and Amityville Horror are true stories; that is, they're much more interested in their own cinematic representation of truth (which, in the cases of those other films, is pretty spotty in and of themselves) rather than any real life documentation. Furthermore, if we are to believe that Lu Chuan is trying to bring attention to a worthwhile cause, then he, like the hapless journalist in the film, does so unsuccessfully -- yes, many of the poachers are brought to justice, but the patrolmen who selflessly devote their lives to protecting the antelopes end up penniless and bereft of any entitlement. (wildlife preserve or no wildlife preserve: show me da money.) During the Q&A following the film (and even throughout the interview he conducted with us), Chuan insisted that in his film, there is no clear line drawn between good and evil -- that his presentation of both sides is a purely humanist one. Of course, we know this not to be true; there's far too much evidence to the contrary: the countless atrocities committed by the poachers; their various assortment of schemes and machinations even while being held captive. Their behavior is juxtaposed against that of the patrolmen, who're fiercely loyal and idealistic, and who aren't afraid to play the role of sacrificial lamb in order to assist the collective good. As for the journalist, I do see him as a rather flimsy narrative device -- he may think of himself as belonging in the trenches with the rest of the gang, but in the end, he's just a wannabe do-gooder whose subsequent reports indict the bad guys but do little to challenge the grander scheme of things.
Having said all this -- most of which, I think is in accordance with your opinion of the film -- I'd like to offer a somewhat different take. I think that Kekexili is, as you and Lu Chuan described it, in many ways, a "thriller." Only, instead of a thriller focusing on the chase and the payoff, it's a psychological thriller with no particular agenda in mind, except to allow us to get into the head of the captain, Ritai. In many ways, it's your classic existential struggle -- we know fundamentally, his intentions are noble, but there's a nagging sense of delusion of grandeur that hints at a tortured soul, one whose lofty ideals don't exactly transfer gracefully when placed alongside the more practical, earthly concerns of his followers. In fact, the film reminds me quite a bit of another excellent slab of nihilism, the criminally slept-on Insomnia (the Norwegian original, not the Pacino/Swank/Williams troika), which tracks a cop's increasingly wayward moral compass -- also accompanied by sweeping vistas and maybe-symbolic-maybe-not wildernesses.
Kekexili, like Insomnia before it, is a bit of a red herring; to me, it's not really about saving the antelopes or Tibetan virtue or even thinly veiled social protest -- it's human imperfection and the vagaries of our "chosen ones" teetering precariously in some alternate version of reality. I'm aware that in suggesting this, I risk making the film sound a little too meta and self-reflexive, but really -- its dopey afterword notwithstanding -- any film that chooses Kekexili (literal meaning: "beautiful mountains, beautiful maidens") as its centerpiece must be aware of its rich symbolic connotations.
Any closing thoughts? Or are we ready to delve into our bleeding hearts for Letters from an Unknown Woman?
-Chi
Chi,
I agree with you in a lot of ways, and I actually liked Kekexili best when it begins to drift into existential abstraction and the sociological and psychological ambiguities come to the surface, although the trite ending undermines some of this complexity. That Lu could insert such ambiguity, no matter how temporary, in the thriller form is testament to the fact that China's "mainstream" cinema doesn't (yet) have an institutionalized factory structure where there is no room for experimentation. And even though Kekexili is a Columbia co-production, evidently Lu was able to exercise some independence to make the film he wanted to. I feel that this is a healthy balance between Hollywood and local production for the Chinese mainstream film industry; the money (and hence, audience) is there, but so is the possibility of some artistic integrity. Now we only need some filmmakers who will exercise this opportunity without resorting to petty Othering...
Letters from an Unknown Woman strikes that balance more interestingly. While it's not a Hollywood co-production, it certainly adopts high production values, at least for a low-budget war romance. This is a genre with many precedents in 20th century western literature and film (A Farewell to Arms, The End of the Affair, The English Patient, Casablanca), and of course, Xu Jinglei's film is an adaptation of a novella by Stefan Zweig which has famously been adapted for the screen by Max Ophuls in the '30s. Here's a rare case of a mainstream film (starring Jiang Wen, one of China's biggest stars) that feels completely uncompromised. The sets and constumes don't lend easily to nostalgia, for the camera never dwells longingly on period trinkets and qipaos. Nor does the plot force itself into the political events (the film takes place between 1930 and 1948) as films often do to claim cultural or historical "authenticity." Most of all, the film proudly depicts a female subjectivity rare in the war romance genre, which in both China and the West tends to be written by male veterans disillusioned by combat and women. Letters from an Unknown Woman (which the then-29-year-old Xu directed, wrote, co-produced, and starred in) really forces us to empathize with her romantic perspective, even though a suspicious viewer could probably pick the romance to death for being too packaged and insular, and too melodramatic. Sure the film is neatly tied together in a flashback structure which ends (as we're told in the opening) with the woman's death, but this self-contained mausoleum of longing perfectly captures the romantic fervor within a specific time and place.
Regarding accusations of melodrama, there's little I care to say since it's become a dirty word and point of contestation in film and gender studies, and there's little I could contribute that hasn't already been said. Linda Williams argued in the '80s that melodrama isn't something to sneer at; in fact, every mainstream Western film is melodrama. Tackling Williams' western approach to melodrama, Chris Berry recently wrote that current Chinese film melodrama both diverts from and draws from western melodramatic traditions, infusing psychologically motivated stories with a sense of Confucian ethics. It would take a closer reading of Letters from an Unknown Woman to see in what ways it fits within these models, although I can quickly hypothesize that Xu adopts both western and Chinese melodramatic modes to express her very distinctly local subjectivity. In this way, it is very similar to Fei Mu's classic Spring in a Small Town and to a lesser extent, Tian Zhuangzhuang's recent remake, which shares the same brilliant cinematographer, Mark Lee Ping-bing, with Xu's film, but drops the haunting female narration present in Fei's and Xu's films. I need to say briefly that Xu's adaptation left me with the same sense of wonder and exhilaration I received from Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven. I haven't yet been able to put words to it, but there's something about these two films that is very comfortable within earlier melodramatic traditions, yet is doing something very hip with it; it can be both ironic and sincere in its visual beauty, period detail, and traditional storytelling strategy. I realize that sounds completely ludicrous without qualification, but let me then say this: both films can be labelled as "woman's genre" films that are built on older, disappearing genres; yet both films unmistakably feel like the works of young directors. Is this the new, post-modern generation of melodrama? I can't quite explain what gives me that sensation. Maybe you can describe it better.
-Brian
Brian,
At last, the gauntlet has been thrown, and it couldn't have come at a better time. While I agree with your assertion that melodrama -- which Letters from an Unknown Woman undoubtedly is -- remains an expletive among most hoity-toity film experts, I don't think it's unnecessarily gotten a bad rap as a genre film. True melodramas -- like Douglas Sirk's masterpieces and Max Ophuls' original version of Letters, even the aforementioned Far From Heaven -- have been widely hailed as great art. The problem arises when films which masquerade as something else entirely -- any of Clint Eastwood's so-called "great American tragedies," Marc Forster's insipid morality tale Monster's Ball -- trade in honest, no-frills storytelling for obscene melodramatic gestures. As for the "authentic" melodrama, I, for one, have never been lured into its world of fussy longueurs and overdone romanticism, maybe because I have yet to appreciate its merits from an artistic (not to mention emotional) standpoint. However, I will say this about Max Ophuls' original; it captures the suffering of a woman's infatuation without making the audience suffer along with it, and also features a galvanic performance from the doe-eyed Joan Fontaine. Xu Jinglei's remake, although it densely reconstructs the film as a war-romance/feminist manifesto, is too showy and self-contained to transcend its tired female subjectivity -- we get that her kind of love is not a groovy kind of love; it's illogical and twisted and unhealthy -- but isn't all love? What makes hers worth 90 minutes of my time?
So that may be unduly harsh -- and it's not that I find what you termed "hip" and radical to be stale and uninspired. (At least, not usually.) It's interesting that you labeled the film a postmodern melodrama, because Xu Jinglei does seem to be at least attempting such a bold enterprise; what's up for debate is whether she achieves it or not. My gripe is that she does in name only; her lyrical narratives reek of a kind of bourgeois profundity -- not out-of-place given the historical context -- but trying too hard for gravitas when mere atmospheric longing would've sufficed.
You also waxed lovingly about the film bearing the unmistakable stamp and swagger of a young director. Yet to me, the film's themes and the identity of its female lead felt creaky and hamfisted; her object of affection is not some dashing young revolutionary or mercurial dignitary -- it's China's favorite everyman, actor Jiang Wen: a sort of poor man's Humphrey Bogart, only without the acid wit. I realize this is precisely the point; that a woman's sexual obsessions knows no bounds, that he doesn't have to be Rock Hudson to provoke such adulation. But it certainly doesn't help that the normally electric Jiang Wen is a blank slate -- forgetful, full of cliches and virtually non-expressive -- while Xu Jinglei's unknown woman is trashy, self-loathing and theatrical. All of which makes it sound like Letters is some hilarious sendup of melodramatic conventions -- which it most certainly is not. For despite trying to subvert tradition, Letters ends up very much wearing its heart on its sleeve. The Notebook, anyone?
Until next time,
Chi
Published: Thursday, April 28, 2005
