Cannes Review: A Touch of Sin (2013)
Cast: Wu Jiang, Vivien Li, Lanshan Luo
Director: Zhangke Jia
Country: Japan | China
Genre: Drama
Official Trailer: Here
What do A Touch of Sin and Django Unchained have in common? Both are about the downtrodden, explore fantasies of revenge, and both are made by directors who know how to shoot violence. Finally, both are twenty minutes too long.
The third film in Competition by Jia Zhangke is a fine mess of four interwoven stories that share a pattern of power to the powerless. Two are great, one is just fine, and one is flat, out of place, and nearly the entire picture. You might have heard of Jia for Still Life (2006), winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The gritty social issues of his earlier work drive and inspire his work, but he is growing as an auteur, and growing fast, sucking in kung fu and gunplay to relay his message about hyper-modern China.
What do A Touch of Sin and Django Unchained have in common? Both are about the downtrodden, explore fantasies of revenge, and both are made by directors who know how to shoot violence. Finally, both are twenty minutes too long.
The cast features old and new faces. Zhao Tao, Jia’s wife (also in The World, 24 City), is the film’s lone female avenger. The Other Woman to a married businessman, she is scorned and cast aside by society and preyed upon by her clients at a salon. The moment she snaps open a fruit knife and Jia leaps from staid camerawork to expertly choreographed kung fu is brilliant: you can feel the medium buckle as Chinese characters use Chinese pop culture to overcome capitalist excess. That the title comes from 1971’s martial arts classic A Touch of Zen compounds the discourse Jia is opening up about Chinese myth-making.
Hardly anyone would have guessed that Jia is an excellent action director. The way he builds up to a shooting spree in the first segment, where disgruntled Dahai (Jiang Wu) takes his magistrate to task over embezzling state funds, would make Peckinpah shake with jealousy. Jiang, brother of superstar Jian Wen (Let the Bullets Fly) is a broken record voice of justice; it’s an unforgettable performance and an opening the rest of the film cannot live up to. Jia meanders back to Still Life realism too much, nearly putting us to sleep before jerking us back into cycles of payback catharsis.
Still, it’s a pretty interesting ride, and there is much to parse about China, capitalism, and what direction, if any, Jia is headed artistically. As in all of his movies, China looms large in the background: half-abandoned factories, half-built airports, and the Yangtze, always the Yangze River. Jia has described himself as a surrealist, reflecting the smorgasbord of conflicting ideologies and cultures of his country. So it’s no surprise we see massage girls in Red Guard uniforms, posing to old Cultural Revolution songs as local and foreign businessmen take their pick.
China’s top auteur is pushing the envelope, if unevenly. It’s too bad this has little to no chance of playing back home.
75/100 ~ GOOD. The third film in Competition by Jia Zhangke is a fine mess of four interwoven stories that share a pattern of power to the powerless.
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Alex is a recent University of Toronto graduate. He is studying Mandarin, going to film festivals, and prepping on his film lore like QT in the 80s. If you're in Beijing over the next few years and do film journalism, get in touch!
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