Zhu Jiong Movies
- 2006
The realism of Chinese helmer Han Jie's juvenile delinquency drama Walking on the Wild Side (AKA Lai Xiao Zi, 2006) brings it closer to a consciousness-raising social document than to a standard western narrative. At once barren, stark, and unremittingly grim, the picture relays the story of several youth whose lives are lost at the outset, and sink ever deeper over the course of the film. At its center is Xiping (Bai Paijiang), a wayward adolescent who whittles away his time with two losers: Erbao (Hou Jing) and Liu Liu (Guo Qiang). They inhabit a lugubrious, wintry world of leafless trees and rocky, muddy hills. Whereas Xiping regularly copulates with a nearby housewife - not for any inherent pleasure, but simply as a necessary release - Liu Liu much prefers raping a schoolgirl for kicks. When the teens draw the mockery of a young boy Xiaosi (Tian Zhaoting), they spill over with collective rage and indignation, leading a violent raid on the school, then seizing Xiaosi and inflicting permanent injury by slamming his head into the ground repeatedly, and bloodying it up. If the rape feels incidental and harmless to them, the violence inflicted on Xiaosi poses enough of a legal threat to send them fleeing from the authorities in a car owned by Liu Liu's dad - with no particular destination in mind and no rest in sight. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
- Starring:
- Bai Paijiang, Guo Qiang, (more)
- 2006
Filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke records an artist at work as well as the changing landscape of China in this documentary. Painter Liu Xiao-dong, who is well known for his large canvases and his leading role in China's "Cynical Realist" movement, travels to the city of Fengjie to work on a project, using people who will lose their homes to the massive Three Gorges Dam as models. Nearly a million will be displaced once the dam is completed, and in Fengjie Xiao-dong paints former factory workers lounging and playing cards in swimming trunks before their city disappears. In Bangkok, the artist turns his attention to young women, who model dresses in the market distract as he tries to capture the bustle and malaise of the changing city. And finally, elsewhere in Bangkok Xiao-dong portrays a pair of blind men making their way through crowded streets. The first feature-length documentary from Jia Zhang-ke, Dong received its North American premiere at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
Jia Zhang Ke's haunting minimalist drama Still Life (aka Sanxia Haoren) takes as its focal point the real-life construction of the Three Gorges Hydro Project and it accompanying massive dam over the Yangtze River in China (allegedly the largest manmade dam in the world) -- a project that required engineers to flood the surrounding territories, including the two millennia-old city of Fengjie. Jia interweaves two stories in connection with the geographical transformation of that area. In the first, Han Sanming (Han Sanming), a miner from northern China, revisits the vicinity after a 16-year absence and attempts to find his wife and his adult daughter -- trying to locate them at addresses that now exist underwater. In the second story, nurse Shen Hong (Zhao Tao) also returns to the site of Fengjie and scours the area for her husband, who has been estranged from her for two years, and who, it seems, has become consumed by the work and lifestyle of an executive. The marriage, it turns out, is irreparable. Meanwhile, as a documentary-style backdrop to these stories, the old structures of Fengjie are continually destroyed -- walls brought to crumbling heaps, towers blown to bits -- and new, makeshift structures installed as replacements. The film thus becomes a sad-eyed meditation on the nature of social change and progress, but it is one that requires the audience to extract these deeper themes and tropes on its own, via inference and deduction. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
- Starring:
- Zhao Tao, Han Sanming, (more)
