Released: 1981 Viewed: March 2020
The Savage Land is a 1981 film by female director Ling Zi. It tells the story of escaped prisoner Hu Zi (Tiger) [Yang Zaibao] who has escaped from prison and returned to his home village to wreak vengeance on Jiao Yanwang, the landowner responsible for his incarceration (and apparently the death of his father and rape of his sister). He finds that Old Jiao is dead but his blind widow is ready to continue the hatred while her weak son Daxing [Liu Jian] is married to Hu’s love Jin Zi [Liu Xiaoqing]. (The backstory is only sketched in and not clearly explained in the film).
Despite the marriage, Hu and Jin Zi quickly take up where they left off. Meanwhile the evil mother is sticking pins in her Jin Zi doll (literally!) and oozing hatred despite her frailty.
Ultimately, after taking revenge, Hu and Jin Zi run away and hide in a forest followed (to great melodramatic effect, if rather unrealistically, by the blind mother.
It is an interesting film but is a bit too uneven to qualify as a lost classic. The movie combines quite staged indoor scenes with much more striking outdoor cinematography emphasizing railways and rolling grasslands. It sometimes looks like an early Chinese ‘eastern’ with Hu resembling a Chinese Clint Eastwood coming back for vengeance. The tone changes again in the last 15 minutes as the film turns into a mystical chase though a verdant forest.
Liu Xiaoqing is excellent in the role of Jin Zi, a woman, like her character in A Woman for Two (1988), contemptuous of convention and disregarding male authority. Liu was also to appear, with ‘Big’ Tony Leung, in Reign Behind the Curtain and Burning of the Imperial Palace (1983) and later in Hibiscus Town (1986) (in fact she is still active). Yang Zaibao is also excellent as the man with a striking name.
The film is based on a 1930s play (aka The Wilderness) by leading playwright Cao Yu (‘the father of modern Chinese theater’). It was filmed in 1981 but apparently not released in China until 1987, unsurprisingly given the main characters’ flexible approach to sexual morality which would hardly have been approved of at the time.
Director Ling (born in 1941) attended film school before the Cultural Revolution but appears to have directed only a handful of films (none of which are readily available) after 1979.
The 1980s are really the lost decade in Chinese cinema with a lot of interesting (and sometimes excellent) movies which more or less nobody has seen.
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