Far East Film Festival 24
Streetwise (also known as Remainder and (in Sichuanese) Gaey Wa’r) is a striking film and a refreshing change from the dross which makes up most of current Chinese cinema.
Set in a small riverside Sichuan city, twenty year old Dongzi [Li Jiuxiao] works (not very successfully) as enforcer for a small (and presumably not very legal) debt collection agency. He is in love with the beautiful and slightly older Jiu’er [Huang Miyi, the highlight of Ripples of Life] who runs a tattoo parlour. Her ex-husband [Sha Baoliang] wants to get back together with her. He also happens to be the head of the debt collection business and a man not to cross.
Jiu’er seems to enjoy Dongzi’s attention but does not take him seriously as a potential boyfriend. Meanwhile, Dongzi is struggling to raise money to pay for his father’s operations although his father [Yao Lu] is, as he accurately puts it, a cunt.
Jiu’er decides to return to her home in Hunnan but Dongzi cannot bring himself to leave his father. Predictably, things begin to spiral out of control.
Like River of Salvation but with a male rather than female protagonist, this film looks at life in China’s smaller developing cities. It is, in some ways, the other side of the coin of that shown in Return to Dust. These are the people and their children who have fled the drudgery of rural life in the hope of something better and who have not (yet) moved to larger cities. This film does not suggest that they have much chance of finding the better life they seek. It is ‘dedicated to all souls in need of comfort’.
A Mainland As Tears Go By both in the sense that it is, at times, rough and uneven but bursting with life and in the sense that you know it won’t end well.
Excellent debut by writer and director Na Jiazuo and brilliant performances by the two leads and indeed the entire cast. Cinematographer Li Jianeng captures the rundown and yet garish urban atmosphere.
The challenge is to ensure that directors with potential such as Na Jiazuo and Gao Qisheng and the numerous exciting young actors in Chinese cinema have an opportunity to appear in more films like this rather than wasting their careers in boring and irrelevant movies.
Set in 2004 for no very obvious reason other than censorship. The film, shown at the Pingyao International Film Festival and at Cannes, has not yet been released commercially in China and (strangely) has no Douban score.
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