Two Boston premieres in the MFA’s “New Films from China” series show that the New Chinese Cinema can meet the West on its own terms. Tang Danian’s City Paradise (1999; March 23 at 5:45 p.m.) and Zhao Jisong’s Scenery (1999; March 22 at 5:40 p.m.), both studies of urban alienation, invoke American and Western European filmic conventions only to tear them down.
Dasheng, the hero of City Paradise, is a transplantee from the country who makes a living in Beijing by washing office-block windows and doing housework for his foster parents. He develops a relationship with a pretty neighbor, also from the country, who first signals her interest by borrowing his bike. From time to time, Dasheng sends money home to his real mother, a demented and angry woman with a cane who is constantly being photographed in oblongs of directional light or crossing a footbridge in elegiac landscape shots.
City Paradise is a country/city film that erodes any bad-faith wistfulness its audience may have about the simple decency of the country while painting a more and more hopeless picture of the city from the worm’s-eye view of the outsider. The film shows the tenuous network of apartment life — the old people trying to maintain dignity, the young people tough, indifferent, and prone to chance contacts and borderline illegalities. Everything is set against a background of traffic noises, through which the director insinuates an anonymous and endless rootlessness. Slow forward and backward tracking shots suggest both a “slice-of-life” way of looking at people and an awareness of how architecture creates boundaries for experience, as in an Antonioni film.
Midway through, when Dasheng returns home, we discover the moral failings of this callow, pleasant cipher. In the plot twists that follow, what seemed a movie about how hard it is for nice young people to get by in Beijing turns out to be a movie in which the people weren’t that nice to start with and are made worse. Exposing the characters’ delusion that in moving to the city they are starting a new life, the film also attacks our own need to believe in innocence — and criticizes the cinema’s tendency to glamorize young, good-looking people and to make urban alienation chic.
The savage goofiness of Scenery — another meta-movie — is a welcome riposte to the two most corrupt movie genres: the American neo-noir and the Wim Wenders or Wenders-inspired sweet-mystery-of-life film. The central character is a lawyer with no clients and a sideline in leather belts (“What I do can hardly be called a success or a failure” is the film’s most representative line of dialogue). Two women appeal to him for help: a taxi driver who says she’s been raped and enlists him in tracking down her assailant, and a hairdresser who befriends him and then calls him up to bail her out when she’s jailed for prostitution. In a parody of how detectives follow up leads in crime movies, the lawyer’s lame quest for the rapist degenerates into reflexively doing whatever people tell him to do (“Call this number,” he is told, whereupon he listens to recorded music for 30 seconds). Scenery also parodies cinematic technological fetishism through the hero’s misadventures with a Sanyo cassette recorder (the film’s centerpiece, which it explores in dazed extreme close-ups in microshallow depth of field).
Scenery has numerous semi-lit scenes in which faces are a quarter-turn away from being engulfed in total darkness; the best of them is a ridiculous Godardian shot in which the camera keeps panning back and forth between the lawyer and the taxi driver in the front of her cab: she’s post-trauma, he’s just flaccid. In the oddest of several non sequitur diversions, the two go to a restaurant; there’s no service, then an earthquake hits. Later, after a sexless tussle, the hero winds up clothed in bed with the hairdresser beneath one of the director’s trademark overhead shots, and the two trade childhood memories while the soundtrack provides electric-guitar noodling — a scene that almost demands to be read as a Wenders parody, though, like everything else in the film, it can also pass as sui generis deadpan absurdism.
“New Films from China” also includes Zhang Yuan’s Seventeen Years (1999; March 16 at 8 p.m. and March 17 at 10:30 a.m.) and Liu Bingjian’s Men Men Women Women (1999; March 29 at 8:20 p.m.), neither of which was available for screening, and two films that the Peter Keough reviewed last month when they were shown in the Harvard Film Archive’s Chinese series, Zhang Ming’s Rainclouds over Wushan (1995; March 24 at 2 p.m.) and Jia Zhang Ke’s excellent Xiao Wu (1998; March 17 at 4 p.m.).
