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Touch of Sin, A
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| Year: |
2013
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Director: |
Jia Zhangke
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| Stars: |
Jiang Wu, Luo Lanshan, Li Meng, Wang Baoqiang, Zhang Jia-Yi, Zhao Tao
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| Genre: |
Drama |
| Rating: |
  7 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
There has been a spill of fruit in this rural area of modern China, where a lorry has overturned, but further along the road a traveller on a scooter is stopped at a bend by three men wielding axes who demand money from him, or else they will attack. Without thinking, the rider reaches into his jacket and produces a pistol which he uses to shoot each of his would-be robbers dead, then continues on his way as if nothing significant had occurred. A short time later, Dahai (Jiang Wu) is in the nearby town where his grudge against the authorities there is growing ever more bitter, especially when it would seem nobody else is interested in rallying to his cause. He's just one of a number of Chinese who will be taking the law into their own hands...
Writer and director Jia Zhangke made his biggest international impact with Tian zhu ding, or A Touch of Sin as it was named in the West as a pun on the famous martial arts epic of the nineteen-sixties, A Touch of Zen, though quite what the distributors thought they were getting at there is none too clear. What this turned out to be certainly contained violence, but not of the acrobatic variety as any attacks here were quick and brutal, not revelling in the action, more sorrowful that society had come to this. Chinese society, that is, as Jia endeavoured to depict what he thought had gone wrong and would continue to be wrong in his homeland, which was basically all those Communist principles had been thrown out the window.
Therefore in the most basic terms, while there was still a hardline government that cracked down on dissent, that wasn't down to ideology, it was thanks to an entirely self-serving strata which exploited the underclass and made it possible for acts of savagery to be implemented in the first place. Jia drew on real life stories for his four pretty much self-contained stories, though there were loose links between them, which was likely why he received next to no publicity for A Touch of Sin in his native country, no matter that he'd won the Best Screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival for it, this simply painted a far too bleak picture of day to day injustice in China. There may have been variations in the plotlines, but they did all more or less say the same thing.
Which was that this path China was on would lead to more death and destruction, either by those lashing out or because the abusers of power will keep turning the screws on those below them until an eruption of frustration bursts out. It's not clear if the director was calling for revolution so much as observing with deep regret the manner in which things had gotten out of hand, and in his view it was because the wrong people had the money. Yes, we were in love of money is the root of all evil territory once again, something which could be a cliché but in Jia's hands, sustaining a realistic tone throughout which thankfully didn't lurch over into pseudo-documentary, became a set of talking points for the audience to take away with them and mull over. He certainly wasn't providing many answers.
The first story had Dahai bringing his feelings of being let down by the town authorities when they sold the local coal mine to boiling point. These bigwigs have spent all the profits they earned from the sale on themselves instead of benefitting the community as they promised, but when confronted, they beat up Dahai and leave him with the nickname "Mr Golf", a reference to the swings taken at his unprotected head. When he goes home to fetch his shotgun, it doesn't take a genius to work out what will happen next. The second story has an immigrant worker forced into dire straits financially, which leads him to take drastic action too, as a serial killer, a murderous mugger helping himself to his victim's handbags. Then there is the tale of the sauna receptionist (Zhao Tao, the director's wife) who has an extremely bad day at work, humiliating her so much that she too lashes out - you see the pattern here, and for that reason this does leave the impression of the same message hammered home over and over, in spite of the twist of the final story. You do get the idea loud and clear, though. Music by Lim Giong.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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