Tomorrow marks Chinese New Year, and this coming year, 4705, is the Year of the Boar, or Pig, whichever you prefer, as other diarists have noted here and here. Minor bit of color trivia: in Chinese culture, the color for protecting against evil is red (sorry, folks). Hence the red banners that festoon buildings and homes, and the red envelopes given to kids, usually with a small money gift as a wish for good luck in the coming year. Today's pointless peregrination is focused on Zhang Yimou, the film director who's been on a bit of a roll in the past year. More below the flip.....
Zhang has had two feature films released on the US arthouse circuit recently, as well as sort of another "movie" release, albeit a one-shot occasion:
- Curse of the Golden Flower (with Chow Yun-Fat and Gong Li)
- The Metropolitan Opera digital movie cast into selected cinemas of the new opera by Tan Dun, The First Emperor (with Placido Domingo)
- Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (with Ken Takakura)
Counting the Met Opera screencast as a movie, I've seen only one of these movies, #3. Briefly, the plot concerns a Japanese father estranged from his son, who is dying of cancer. The dad receives a video that his son made of a Peking opera singer in China, and which also said that the son hoped to return to tape a full performance of the Peking opera of interest, which is the movie's title. So the father, trying to become reconciled with his son, travels to China to find that singer and complete the documentary.
Thus RAfToM is something of a Chinese road movie, complete with cultural misunderstandings and a bumbling sidekick, the latter a rural guy who becomes the father's new translator after the first one doesn't work out, except that the second guy speaks very minimal Japanese, so that the father has to keep calling the first translator on her cell phone to help out, which is part of the former, especially as the father speaks not one word of Chinese. If you followed all the dependent clauses in that last sentence, you're a bigger loser than me.
Two depictions of aspects of Chinese society in the movie are of note:
(1) It turns out that the singer has gone to prison as a result of a bar fight. At one point, the father is trying to get help to find the singer's original village. In the town where the son shot the video, just before the father and translator #2 go to the next town, there's a huge feast scene where the entire village sets up a long row of tables that everyone sends food up and down, where the father is a welcome guest. This struck me as a very idealized depiction of this Chinese village as one big happy family, all friendly and welcoming, where food is plentiful and "we're all in this together", kind of like a Chinese version of a Norman Rockwell scene.
(2) Later, the father does manage to clear a lot of bureaucratic hurdles to get access to the prison where the opera singer is serving his sentence. One of the first things you see is the marching formations of prisoners, all chanting slogans to the effect of "we accept our rehabilitation for the good of society and our country" in unison, all spic-n-span, very well drilled and organized. Likewise, in what looks like the recreation hall, it looks very well kept.
The small irony is that several of Zhang's past films, such as Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern and To Live, got him trouble with the Chinese authorities for his depictions of Chinese life, which were hardly rude or snarky. More recently, though, his films like Hero, House of Flying Daggers and Curse of the Golden Flower have been more "escapist", and Zhang is in good enough grace with the authorities that he will be directing the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. One wonders if, or how much, he's toned his work down (sold out?) to keep on the right side of the authorities.
But then, that's something that we all have to do, like it or not: hold back in the face of dumb people with power. Honesty does not always work, as George McGovern found out in that nutrition report from the 1970's that recommended eating less red meat in the American diet, which got the cattle farmers in SD riled enough that McGovern lost his 1980 Senate election (self read this in that recent Michael Pollan NYT article called "Unhappy Meals").
With that said, you know what to do next.....