China: A Touch of Sin (2013)
I do sometimes wonder how much I'm missing from these films. Take this Chinese film, for example. Now, I'm not Chinese. I don't speak Chinese (although I am aware that Mandarin and Cantonese are different languages). I've never been to China and don't have a great understanding of the culture. There must be references in A Touch of Sin that have gone over my head. There must be messages that the audience are expected to understand that I simply don't spot. There must be in-jokes that don't make sense to an outsider. If there aren't, the film probably isn't doing its job. It's being generic instead, and that's not what I want from this project.
Oh, the irony. I want to see films that I don't understand. If I don't, they're clearly not authentic enough. But at the same time, I'm going to complain if I don't find them relatable. I am setting expectations that no one will be able to match. I am my own worst enemy.
I suppose, really, that what I actually want is to be intrigued enough by a film that I understand what I'm given but I'm sufficiently curious to want to know more. I may not see every nuance (and, given that I'm usually watching with subtitles, possibly never will), but I want to be aware of that, and at the same time not find it off-putting. I'm asking a great deal, I know, but I don't think I'm asking too much - if I was expecting less then I'd be settling for less. I'd be watching films from all around the world and expecting them to maintain a very specific standard that allowed for no deviation or variation. And where's the fun in that? If I want to see a film made by cookie cutter I can just watch something from a franchise. The whole point of this is to be surprised, to be challenged and to see something novel. I loved last year's Weapons, but I don't want to see another 194 films just like it. I want variety.
The films that have disappointed so far haven't been the films that tried to do something fresh and failed; they're the films that tried to be familiar and succeeded. The Boat is insipid. The Devil's Kiss could have been from anywhere. Daratt could only be from Chad. Liyana could only be Eswatinian.
I'm torn on A Touch of Sin. On the one hand I suspect that I'm missing a huge amount because I'm not Chinese, and on the other hand I don't want to dismiss the film for not being accessible to a Westerner, because it was accessible. I just don't think I got as much out of it as I should.
The film is a study of violence. It draws on four cases from recent Chinese news reports and presents a fictionalised version of each story. There's a vague linking device. Most portmanteau films in this vein are horror; this is drama. It's unusual, and it doesn't suffer from the same issue most horror features do - none of these stories are too short, and none of them feel over-long. At half an hour for each instalment they're the right length, but they do suffer from one over-riding question: why?
And I think that's where I'm falling down as the viewer. Writer/director Zhangke Jia doesn't seem to know why either. In a couple of cases the violent acts make sense (the disenfranchised worker in the first story who finally snaps when he can't do anything about the corruption and greed around him, for instance), but even then his reaction is so extreme (he goes on a killing spree) that it's hard to understand, for an outsider, the pressure that has driven him to this. Or perhaps it's hard for Zhangke Jia too. Perhaps this is his way of trying to come to terms with apparently senseless violence that he's seen in the news.
To be fair to Jia, there is nothing sensationalist about these extremely graphic acts of killing, and they're presented in a disturbingly realistic way. If you shoot someone they're not going to die in John Woo slow-mo as bullets pass before them. They're going to die quickly. That's what people do here; die quickly. And bloodily. It's the factual approach to such acts that makes them both more baffling and also more disturbing - baffling because they're so extreme, disturbing because they're so real. There's no Hollywood glamour to these deaths; they're brutal.
But, ultimately, I found the film dissatisfying. The link between the four chapters is barely there, and there's nothing to add cohesion or comprehension to them; they just happen. I fully accept that meaning may have been lost in translation, or that the ambiguity is the point and that I missed it due to cultural differences, but this is very much the first film I've seen that made me think I didn't quite get it simply because I'm not Chinese.
Perhaps I should have watched the extras! (Okay, that was intended as a glib and pithy way to end the review, but in all honesty I do feel that I missed something here and I'm intrigued enough by it that I will probably come back to it. Not to bask in the richness of the script (a couple of the others I've seen so far will definitely be re-watched for that very reason), but simply to see what I missed, because the film was strong enough, and the presentation arresting enough, that I feel - for only the first time - that the fault is mine; not because I simply didn't like the film, but because I didn't fully understand it.)
Disc: Blu-ray (Region B, UK)
Source: eBay
Availability: Still widely available; other Regions have editions (USA/Japan) and other European editions exist. Intriguingly, the country in which it's hardest to see the film is China itself.