CantripZ
Two men befriend itinerant workers in order get them work in the mines posing as a relative... then they kill them and, as family, claim compensation.After a successful score, the pair find a fresh-faced youth just come from the country and take him under their wing planning to start over again - but their new protégé is a genuine innocent, and their relationship shifts around him until it becomes clear that their plan won't run so smoothly this time around...I've seen this described both as an art-house character drama and as a kind of noir thriller, and while neither description is wrong both ideas of the movie lack something. It's neither - it's just an excellent film.If it's a character drama, it scores: all three central characters are brilliantly played and have the idiosyncratic, sometimes inconsistent feel of real people. You laugh with them and feel for them, even when sometimes you shouldn't.If it's a noir it also scores: bleak, honed to a sharp point and without an ounce of fat on, it's a mesmeric film in which the viewer is compelled to keep watching... in spite of the inescapable feeling that it's not going to end happily.On the other hand, it's visually a world apart from the majority of Chinese art movies. With no music to relieve the realism, it eschews sumptuous visuals in favour of a raw, documentary style which pays off from the first scene, impressing on the viewer the mundane nature of its characters and how chilling simple their plan is.Unlike most noir flicks, it's not overtly a thriller. Events unfold at their own pace, without the careful buildup and the climactic peak of the traditional thriller, and the murder and crime are presented as a part of these men's lives rather than the central subject of the film.The central subject of the film is people, and that's where this film's unique impact lies. Not a film noir and not an art film, this is just a fine film which also happens to be a work of art.
chenlingshan
***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** Two sequences hold the key to the Real of what Li Yang's debut is about. One is about the scene, in which the prostitute who deflowers Feng, pumps into him in a post office, ambiguously greeting him by sliding her hand through his shoulder. When she walks away, Feng turns his head over and looks at her backside with a bit sweet smile. In a screening session of the film (in Beijing University, Oct.2003), Li Yang is asked what his intention to incorporate this seemingly irrelevant sequence in the narrative. His answer is that his mode of film making is not Hollywood style - the transparent narrative which strictly follows cause-and-effect lineage narrative. The second one is about the end, in which Feng sees off Zhang and Wang at the site of a crematorium, ambiguously watching their bodies being pushed into the furnace (a MC shot of the foot when the body is pushed into the furnace), followed by a MC shot of the black smoke. Li Yang is criticized to make this scene rather redundant and sentimental.To me, this end is the key to the Real of the diegetic reality, which answers the first sequence in question as above mentioned. In fact, there are mutual blind spots in the eyes of these two parties. If one looks at the depiction of Feng purely from the perspectives of Zhang and Wang, Feng's pleasant reminiscence of his first sexual encounter with a whore, is actually invincible to Zhang and Wang. Similarly, one could find another blind spot in the eyes of Feng as well, regarding the story of Zhang and Wang. The trust of Feng in Zhang and Wang is sustained until the moment Zhang hit the head of Wang. Although the audience is very clear about the motivation disclosed by the narrative's all-knowing point-of-view (pov), it is opaque to Feng. The final scene in the shaft, if one follows strictly from the perspective of Feng, logically would leave the impression on Feng that these two adults have some conflicts unknown to him, and he accidentally witnesses the murder of Wang.Such a mutual mis-recognition, of course, is presupposed by Li Yang, from which the director's subjectivity emerges. It is true that the narrative presents a simple moral view of life that the evil will be finally punished. The all-knowing pov, like a spectre smoothly wondering around and showing every aspect of characters to the spectator, plays an important role in leaving such a impression. The benefit of such a all-knowing pov is that the director can create an illusion which satisfies the latent desire of the audience - bad guys must be punished. Scrutinizing the narrative closely, one could find that the existence of the real law is suspended in the diegetic reality.Li Yang has emphasized Feng's innocence by depicting his love of reading historical books, the responsibility for his family, his sympathy to a child begging in the street, and his respect for the adult. The forced choice to have a sex with a prostitute, although is planned by Zhang and Wang, is actually a contingent act in Feng's life as he does not know their intention. He most likely would think that they want him to pass a kind of ritual, so he can be treated by them as an adult. Retrospectively, it is discernible that Feng actually enjoys having a sex with a whore so he smiles later when he is alone in a bathtub.
Therein resides the significance of a seemingly irrelevant sequence of Feng's rendezvous with the same prostitute in a postal office. Isn't Feng's ambiguous look at her walking off betrays his desire for her, which no longer completely renders him shameful as before? It is from this sequence that a kind of motion or the transference is set off, in which the attitude of life from Zhang and Wang starts to be assimilated into Feng. Only with this implicit transference in mind, can the significance of the end be discernible. If Feng's forced choice to have sex with a whore opens his vision of life, as a kind of unexpected enlightenment by the reign of Eros, then the diminish of Zhang and Wang's body into a black smoke corresponds to the reign of Thanatos (God of Death). It is worth emphasizing that the Real of the narrative is that Feng has no idea about two adults' murderous plan, yet the diegetic reality is that the moral lesson is still imposed by an accident, which in fact is the displacement of the law with the Freudian-Lacanian notion of the Thing.The evaporation of these two adults' corpses in the end creates a void, from which the Thing emerges, just like the spectre of the first victim in the beginning returns as the all-knowing pov. Therein resides the meaning of Feng's look at the black smoke as a witness of their death. He will be haunted by the spectre of the dead forever, because the Real of their death is unknown to him. This blind spot is strictly from the perspective of Feng, which is not in coincidence with the illusion created by all-knowing pov of the narrative. It is discernible only by looking awry from the perspective of Feng, and the gap between the Real and the diegetic reality is caused by what Freud designates as the death drive. Several film directors, such as Hitchcock, Kieslowski, and David Lynch, have passionate attachment to this gap - the death drive that resists the overlapping of the Real with the reality, and now a Chinese director seems to be a potential one to join this club. More importantly, Li Yang's insistence has appeared from acute social awareness of current problems of illegal coal mining in China, which becomes the convincing and catchy backdrop of a fictive story.
mid-levels
***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** This film is about two con-men who lure unsuspecting rural chinese men who are hard up for jobs into working at coal mines with them. They convince the sucker to tell the mine operators that he is related to one of the con-men. After a few weeks they get the sucker alone in the mine, kill him, claim a part of the mine collapsed on him and then get monitary compensation from the company as relatives. The story is intresting but the ending is the usual "good guys win in the end" dribble. The most intresting part of this film is the exposure of lifestyles in rural China and the demeaning and dehumanizing aspects of being one of the countries millions of under educated migrant workers. The coal mining aspect of this exposure is most poinant in that thousands of coal miners die every year because of the types of conditions displayed in the film. The insights into the lifestyle are reason enough to see "Blind Shaft". This is not the kind of movie the Chinese government really wants out there and it's just short of miracle that this is out there. If you get a chance check it out, you won't be disappointed.
