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Southern exposure
Noteworthy Chinese filmmaker Zhu Wen explores his country's remote southern region with "South of the Clouds."
By FRANK EPISALE
Offoffoff.com
(Reviewed at the Hawaii International Film Festival in November 2004.)
With "Clean," which opened the 2004 Hawaii International Film Festival,
Olivier Assayas attempted to expand the French New Wave aesthetic into a
post-national road-trip of a film. Zhu Wen, by contrast, so
successfully transposes to China the Antoine Doinel films' geographic specificity, and their
simultaneously affectionate and detached approach to character, that his "South of the Clouds" seems a far
more legitimate successor to Truffaut's work. The comparison between Zhu
Wen and Truffaut is explicitly validated with the film's last shot, a
direct visual quote of final freeze-frame close-up from "The 400 Blows." To
dwell any further on this point, though, would be a disservice to the
culturally specific and aesthetically meditative story of "South of the
Clouds."
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Xu Da Qin, an aging widower with grown but not entirely
independent children, is taking a vacation to the remote Yunnan
province. The first half of the film, while introducing us to his life
and his family, also makes it clear that there is some hidden and deeply
personal reason for this trip, and that no matter how many people talk
of more "sensible" vacation choices, various reasons to postpone the
trip, etc., he is determined to make this journey. Most of all, there is
the sense that he has been waiting for a long time to see Yunnan.
Once he sets off, the narrative takes a notable turn towards
the surreal. Dream sequences become difficult to distinguish from
reality. Conversations are cryptic, formally polite but weighted with
mysterious meaning. The camera dwells on faces and landscapes for just a
second or two longer than feels "natural." Little by little, we are
allowed hints of insights into the reason for this pilgrimage, and along
the way we are exposed to meditations on gender, generation gaps and
mysticism that never quite coalesce but are fascinating
nonetheless.
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"South of the Clouds" is aided by Li Xue Jian's subtle
portrayal of the protagonist and by Wang Min's extraordinary
cinematography of the landscapes of southern China. There's no question,
though, that novelist/poet turned filmmaker Zhu Wen is operating in
auteur mode here, another connection to the nouvelle vague. His film has won a number of awards over the past year, including the Jin
Jue Award at the Shanghai Film Festival and the Fipresci International
Critics Prize at the Hong Kong Film Festival. Unlike his directorial
debut, "Seafood," Zhu Wen's "South of the Clouds" is officially sanctioned by
China's Film Bureau, but doesn't seem to have suffered from any
restrictions or censorship that may have been imposed. It is a
significant achievement by a distinctive emerging filmmaker, and marks
the director as an artist to watch.
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NOVEMBER 9, 2004
OFFOFFOFF.COM • THE GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE NEW YORK
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