By Bryan Hartzheim
Li Yifan and Yan Wu's probing, but predictably lumbering documentary "Before the Flood" opens up a can of worms that the rest of the world would be well advised to um, swallow. Or at least digest a little.
Once completed, the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River will be the largest hydroelectric dam in the world. Supplying a massive future source of electricity and an attempt to control the spontaneous and notorious floods of the Yangtze, the dam -- built in between the spectacular series of canyons on the Yangtze known as the Three Gorges -- will be a monumental colossus: one-and-a-half miles wide, 600 feet high and 400 miles long, the thing will be able to create as much energy as 18 nuclear power plants.
The construction will also have caused, by its projected completion in 2009, the partial or complete inundation of two cities, 11 counties, 140 towns, 326 townships, and 1351 villages. About 23,800 hectares and anywhere from 1.1 to 1.9 million people will have been resettled. It is on one of these villages, the 2000-year-old Fengjie, that directors Li Yifan and Yan Yu place their documentarian impetus. The entire village, part of a larger city of approximately 300,000 residents, is told by government officials that they must be relocated, their homes demolished and businesses reestablished, within a span of a few years as a submission to encroaching industry.
Many of us are already familiar with this story, and even the documentary scope of a community displaced by a devastating decision from the higher-ups might be more familiar to American audiences through Michael Moore's satiric Roger and Me. But as the film deftly moves in and out of relaxed family hostels, cramped but cozy interiors, and some excessive shots of delicious-looking bowls of rice and condiments, the directors' camera is removed of irony and is obviously affectionate; we aren't meant to laugh one bit at this innocent village's plight. Largely devoid of remnants of pop culture, these voyeurs' film is a chronicle of an older, traditional, and somewhat nostalgic China.
Remarkably though, the film is mostly removed of sentimentality, no easy feat considering the lachrymose subject matter. An occasional tear is dropped, but the camera quickly wipes it away. Li and Yan achieve this through an omniscient lens that attempts to recount residents, governmental cadres, and the construction itself. We are of course meant to side with the residents, but by eschewing interviews and a dominating narrative, the filmmakers opt instead to locate all participants in the melee and treat each without judgment. It could be considered a fitting style for a town full of people who no one will listen to, while the camera becomes a sole occasional outlet for enraged outbursts of frustration.
This egalitarian approach, however, is unfortunately the film's great weakness as well. By being so blindly omniscient, the filmmakers dilute the importance of the power that these characters' stories import. Though it's the displaced community here that's the thing, and certainly deserving of our attention, its residents provide the most narrative variety. Instead, we see time and again cadres attempting to tear down the place, and then shot after shot of the place being ripped apart and blown up.
It's rather amazing that the filmmakers could have spent so many years getting to know these villagers while giving them such a short shrift on the screen. When they are on, the filmmakers don't endeavor to paint more than one portrait; no one is really set apart from one another, everyone just experiences the same bleak tragedy. The filmmakers treat most of these people with the same detachment characteristic of those bureaucratic cadres, and it all gets repetitive pretty quickly. This repetitive message, true and shared as it is, can't possibly sustain a film of this running time without any narrative variety. Li and Yan could have used the knife of a good editor, as their technique becomes evidently less unorthodox and just plain undisciplined.
The directors still understand that the citizens, and not the cadres, are the important ones, but the impulse to observe from afar obviously creates distance rather than empathy. When the film does get in close -- like when a son lifts his suffering mother into bed (of a house they refuse to leave) -- there are some truly moving sequences. An elderly man and his wife are sympathetically portrayed, and in one magnificent sequence, the man wanders around the newly allocated plots of the village (only a few square meters for entire families) trying to find a spot not already occupied. He eventually makes his way to the dam itself, searching interminably for any scrap of living space, and the camera splendidly captures his dwarfed figure next to the monstrous, mechanical behemoth that has substituted for the humanity of this man and many others just like him.
Li has said that he didn't need government approval for the film since it was a private, personal project. But make no mistake: Before the Flood is a piece sharply critical of a modern China that is willing to push its poor and oppressed to the psychopathic margins in order to gain global clout. For this chief reason it is worth seeing. Invariably, it is less interested in how the displaced manage to survive grave circumstances than in how they got there to begin with. Today, we see glazed Mercedes and the gleaming high-rises of Beijing and Hong Kong and we think we are witnessing a new capitalistic country that builds fashionable, consumer-friendly cisterns. These filmmakers revive for us the continued existence of the once-deemed antediluvian concept of comrades, and these cohorts operate by motorized creeds like, “Size, power, function of building” when allocating families to disheveled hollows resembling Hooverville shanties.
Despite the inherent flaws in the film's approach, the ultimate message here is the bold challenge to a Chinese government that, despite the pretense of modernity, has not yet changed from its outdated roots of sacrificing basic human rights for the “greater good”. For a country that jails more journalists than any other in the world, the film is also an astonishingly fresh reminder that the seedy underbelly of life will not be swept under the rug as long as there remains artists out there to supply a clarion call to the voices of the disregarded and would-be forgotten.
Other L.A. Film festival coverage:
Cavite
Tony Takitani
L.A. Fim fest preview
The Beautiful Country
Published: Thursday, June 23, 2005
