贾樟柯导演的《天注定》| a touch of sin, directed by jia zhangke

i've been thinking about the scene with dahai at the post office - it's really quite perfect. dahai is exposed as a naïf, who has bought into the party propaganda that justice will be dispensed swiftly and certainly from 中南海 (the equivalent of the capitol building in DC, i think.) so he just tells the postal clerk, send it there! and while it's not surprising that she rebuffs him, i kind of feel that if dahai had been, say, the factory owner, the postal clerk would have known how to send the letter, would have found a way.

― 乒乓, Saturday, October 19, 2013 10:28 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

interesting

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/q-a-jia-zhangke-on-his-new-film-a-touch-of-sin-part-2/?_r=0

Q.
You’ll be at the New York Film Festival at the end of September. Are you looking forward to it?

A.
It has a big Chinatown, and I’m looking forward to going there. The first thing is always to find a Chinatown. Then you can have a great Chinese meal. [laughs]

HEll Yeah

i did a little bit more digging and so yeah, snakes in chinese are a pretty standard trope for seductresses. or at least can be. i'm not familiar enough with wuxia films to know how jia is playing off that symbolism. see also the shot where the camera pans to the cloth w/ the tiger print, and you hear the tiger roar.

Really unexpected move by Jia (though I had been tipped even just skimming reviews) ... still 'documentary' elements aren't *entirely* absent I thought, just in comparison to what he'd been doing.

I knew this was episodic going in, but not sure if they were gonna overlap; so I was glad when we reached the end of Dahai's spree. For a bit.

For several months it has been pegged as being set to receive a (domestic) theatrical release in November, but still a more specific date has still not been set.

Now reports are emerging that the Chinese authorities have banned local media from reporting on the film or reviewing the picture, which claimed the best screenplay award at Cannes, where it played in competition.

http://variety.com/2013/film/news/silence-surrounds-jia-zhangkes-sin-1200853839/

i can see blue valentine 10+ times in manhattan today, and touch of sin once, at 1.40 in the afternoon.

yes and it's the last day, which is why i follow what's exiting theaters with great paranoia.

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/taiwan-may-miss-out-on-jia-zhangkes-a-touch-of-sin/?_r=0

Everything seems fishy

what's fishy about the taiwan situation? i think it's, 1) a case of it just not being that big of a movie compared to what else is on the quota list and the quota longlist. there must be some goofy romantic comedies on the list but also drug war,《毒战》 and the grandmaster/《一代宗师》). 2) maybe a little bit about responding to cultural sector grumbling about mainland cultural influence. the last two years that mainland films won golden horse awards, let the bullets fly/《让子弹飞》 in 2011 and beijing blues/《神探亨特张》 in 2012, there was lots of handwringing, if that's the right word, about mainland films winning taiwanese awards and the brutish machinery of the mainland film industry overrunning taiwan.

even if it doesn't screen, i don't think it's a huge deal. on the other hand, it's never ever ever getting a legit mainland release. i feel like xi jinping or someone else near the top had a moment with this film something like deng xiaoping seeing unrequited love/《苦练》 for the first time.

Wasn't talking about the quota, I was referring to the fact that Jia writes that he can't go for "personal, insurmountable reasons" right around the same time that it's looking like the permission to release A Touch of Sin in the mainland is being revoked

Come on man, that stinks

Your points 1) and 2) are diametrically opposed, if Taiwan really was concerned about mainland brute clout cultural hegemony surely they'd shortlist smaller, more independent productions like A Touch of Sin over lamestream trash like American Dreams in China and Back to 1942

But the quota isn't set with regards to concerns about commercial appeal, the whole process is done through a lottery, if it was about commercial appeal films like Lost in Thailand and So Young would have already received widespread Taiwan releases

Drug War and the Grandmaster have already been released in Taiwan this year, bro

right, the fact that he suddenly can't go is strange. is your feeling that jia is a smart operator that plays the game just as much as is necessary to keep making pictures (pulling his documentary from melbourne, for example) or that he's got no choice?

and i see what you're saying about taiwan. i guess i'd like to slim my argument down to just saying that a touch of sin might be on the radar of the nytimes but isn't a huge deal to taiwanese cinemagoers compared to other bigger films coming from the mainland.

http://i.imgur.com/LPcuSwz.jpg

-- seeing wang baoqiang who i can't help but associate with his xu sanduo forrest gump soldier role/going to thailand being in love with fan bingbing and making her scallion cakes role/shilling for instant noodles and cold medication every commercial break on cctv wasting those motherfuckers on the road was a good shock.

i think the first chapter with dahai battling the maserati coal boss in shanxi (spending the last two months in shanxi made that chapter hit even harder) was clearly directly riffing on lin chong in 《heroes of the marsh》/《all men are brothers》/《the water margin》/, 《水浒传》-- the part of the opera that dahai catches is the part where lin chong is FORCED to kill gao qiu's two thugs... which is what 《水浒传》 is all about: righteous men forced to resort to violence against those in charge because the rules of brotherhood and 江湖 ----The concept of Jianghu can be traced to the 14th century novel Water Margin, in which a band of noble outlaws, who mounted regular sorties in an attempt to right the wrongs of corrupt officials, retreated to their hideout. These bandits were called the Chivalrous men of the Green Forests or 绿林好汉, the "green forest" (绿林, lǜlín) was the antecedent to Jianghu.---- also the lin chong story and other water margin stories aren't just about fighting injustice but about being humiliated (gao qiu's son is trying to fuck lin chong's wife -- dahai is beaten in front of a crowd and given that nickname etc) and the lin chong story hinges on a weapon too.... and it sort of directs the rest of the film toward that novel in particular where good men are forced into violence

whether justified attacks on corrupt leaders that have violated a sort of cosmic REMEMBER THE WATER MARGIN BOYS CAME OUT OF STARS natural righteousness that's destroying the natural world and humans together
and just chaotic fucked up violence which is also well represented in wuxia literature and the water margin in particular
and even the righteous violence can't be controlled and you have a lot of righteous characters inflicting a lot of collateral damage in their quest for justice.

i took a lot of pleasure in watching wang baoqiang shoot people down

I'm actually shocked to find out that Wang Baoqiang is an accomplished actor who's been involved in many big name projects rather than just a farmer plucked from a village

He looks so weedy

Never read the Water Margin, am really intrigued by yer post now

I've been reading about lots of land disputes in China that follow the same exact pattern of the shanxi story

Rural land, as we know, is collectively owned by the farmers of the village & use-rights can only be created if the villagers vote on it

The village convinces the farmers that allowing the land to be developed will be beneficial to all, profits will be distributed to all the villagers, jobs will be created and given to the villagers

Magically, all the profit that comes in somehow is retained by the village leaders & the farmers maybe get a carton of cigarettes + black lung

omg only just found out that Suikoden is the Japanese translation of "Water Margin", old Playstation RPG makes sense now

wang baoqiang is the star of this i think. best performance in the film: puffing lit the cigarettes in the kitchen and paying obeisance to ghosts... raising his pistol to the sky while the village sets off fireworks... the interactions with his son and wife... the ice cold robbery scene....

having seen this now, it's crazy that it was ever even rumored to have a mainland release. a lot of the chinese lang reviews from mainland viewers seem to see it as a direct attack on the party/govt even if they sometimes use slightly euphemistic terms to refer to that direct criticism.... obv that obsession with china (r.i.p. ct hsia) thing--focusing on any work of art produced by a chinese artist as being totally 100% about china and unrelatable to the greater experience of mankind whatever--is not the most interesting way to look at it.

they note in particular the use of the city wall, the yellow plains, eternal symbols of 5000000 years of history blah blah blah and how chinese history seems to be trapped in a cycle of moral decay->violence.

plus how if you view it as a retelling of the water margin... and more than any of the other 4 classics the water margin figured big in communist party romantic views of itself (mao loved it and it must have made good reading while they were hiding out in the caves yanan imagining they were liangshan heroes revolting against a failing empire and its corrupt bureaucracy) and in, like, actual party policy (discussion of the book and its lessons about fighting capitulationists within the party among other lessons were important during the cultural revolution). ...i think the the water margin parallels are obvious and it has an important history of being used to sort of obliquely attack corrupt leadership and affirm the correctness of revolt.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/dd86b174efac3f893be3ca3cf76be4d4/tumblr_n0rfecSG6F1r6ivyno1_500.jpg

i enjoyed this, but had a hard time reconciling some of the 'genre' elements with jia's more usual 'realistic' mode

i loved that about it.

Yeah, the tension between naturalism (for lack of a better term for how Jia's style is coded) and street-opera theatricality was part of what made it so compelling for me, along with the film's masterful pacing.

yeah... although i never really thought of any of his films as being, like particularly "realistic" or naturalist in any sense

like platform is super stylized and formal iirc

i think it's harder to separate his last few from realism, just because of social context, mastery of super-modern-seeming digital video & the extent to which they foreground docu-fiction grey-areaness

i think my 'complaint' is maybe that jia doesn't subject 'genre' to the same interrogation and play as he does 'the real'? i dunno, you are all v. persuasive

the genre moments are so fleeting that their duration almost feels like like that interrogation in and of itself?

http://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/how-china-made-sure-thered-be-no-touch-sin-oscars

i want to see this. it was in sight n sounds best of 2013 list. i did really like unknown pleasures, but thought that the second half, or third act or thereabouts, lost some of the realism and interesting stuff about the interaction between the characters and ended up with a few too many typically arthouse shots, things like the bike not starting up the hill, then having to stop on the motorway, i do like long unbroken shots and all the rest of it, but it seemed to almost be too easy after the momentum of everything that came before that, like a lapse into a romance of fallibility/the everyday, compared with the realism/reportage of the rest of the film. did love the ending though.

I am going to watch this again tonight because it's characters have been haunting my thoughts all week.

Which characters haunt your thought the most?

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/03/14/jia-zhangke-explains-why-censors-are-scared-of-his-award-winning-film/?mod=WSJBlog

The kid who works in factories probably, saying that there isn't a weaker part of the anthology.

Which Haunting Touch of Sin Character Are You?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Yujiao_incident

I like the way Jia has inverted the hollywood trait of female depictions always being younger than the real characters.

in his casting? that's his lover/muse so I don't think the casting decision was deliberately provocative or anything, also why in hell would he be responding to Hollywood conventions in particular?

i assume you mean zhao tao.

the way he casts her in everything has given me pause, there's that scene in "i wish i knew" where she's wandering in the rain in shanghai and the camera lingers over the wet t-shirt clinging to her body and it's like ENOUGH, JIA ZHANGKE! ENOUGH! the scene felt so out of place (like other stuff in that film) that it exacerbated the sense of total indulgence.

he's an interesting filmmaker to say the least but i do think he peaked with platform, at least so far. something a bit glib about his recent fiction/doc hybrids that doesn't sit right w/ me. that includes still life/dong, useless, i wish i knew, 24 city.... i'd say the most interesting filmmaker working in china was Jiang Wen but his last film was a disappointment... stylistically bold and narratively intriguing but also kind of incoherent, and too many action films that played the same.

action SCENES

Let The Bullets Fly? Yeah that was trash

Lol didn't realise she was his lover, I preferred it when I thought it was a casting decision. I am watching 24 City this week on the strength of how much I loved AToS and suppose am trying project extra auteur points on Jia to an extent.

i didnt know she was his lovermuse

too bad prince won't let that one out of the vault

Let The Bullets Fly? Yeah that was trash

― 龜, Tuesday, March 18, 2014 5:32 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I wouldn't say "trash" but it didn't add up to much

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/03/18/taiwan-is-afraid-that-chinese-movies-are-becoming-too-good/

that's a weird headline for an article that's mostly about trade protections etc.

btw european cinemas worried about this re. american films in silent/early sound eras. well, european film producers did. the distributors were happy to cash in on distributing/exhibiting american movies. actually one reason france's film industry was fairly dysfunctional in those days was this split in priorities between producers and distributors/exhibitors. similarly i'm sure that the folks who own taiwan's cinemas would love to have popular chinese films to show (I don't really count jia's films in that group though).

finally released on DVD in a couple weeks

and blu-ray I hope?