***/****
starring Jiang Wu, Zhao Tao, Wang Baoqiang, Luo Lanshan
written and directed by Jia Zhangke
by Angelo Muredda The blood doesn't flow so much as it
spurts in A Touch
of Sin, Jia Zhangke's invigorated if uneven
return to straight fiction following an extended sojourn in hybridized
documentaries about modern Chinese cities. More than the formal homecoming,
however, it's the nature of the storytelling that surprises in his newest–the
leap from the elegiac tone of films like 24 City
into the more primal stuff of pulp. A wuxia
anthology with revenge-thriller overtones, A Touch of Sin is an unusually direct genre exercise for a master
filmmaker, in the sense that, unlike Steven Spielberg's Munich and other comparably shame-faced prestige films that
dip a single toe in the waters of genre, it doesn't condescend to the populist
trappings of the material. Jia isn't slumming so much as tapping into the
righteous indignation of a popular tradition of stories about wronged knights
and ruined innocents, sincerely transposed here to the working-class fringe of
a nation state in the throes of late capitalism. If Jia's violence comes fast
and leaves a mess, then, it's a testament to his willingness to get his hands
dirty where others might have kept a safer distance.
After a finely-tuned opening that
interweaves two of the narrative strands to follow, we meet Dahai (Jiang Wu), a
frustrated coal miner in Shanxi province who resolves to take arms against the
corrupt overseers who've sold off the collective property of the mine without
providing dividends to the workers. Although his cause is clearly tainted by
his paranoiac delusions of grandeur, Dahai comes off as a suffering saint next
to our subsequent protagonist, Zhou San (Wang Baoqiang), a migrant worker on a
motorcycle who seems to make do strictly through the spoils of his violent
muggings. From there, we turn to Xiao Yu (Zhao Tao), a receptionist at a spa
who, before the working day is done, is threatened by both her lover's family
and a couple of surly businessmen who stumble in after hours demanding sexual
favours. Her ecstatic outburst is balanced by the relatively subdued closing
story of a young textile worker named Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan), who flees his job
when an accident puts him in debt to a colleague and finds new work as a
server in a grotesque upper-class brothel, where he falls in love with a young
prostitute in military garb.
The anthology format is a smart
vehicle for this kind of cultural criticism, insofar as it articulates Jia's
communitarian politics in structural terms without resorting to too much heavy
symbolic lifting–it's enough that the four protagonists are on parallel tracks–or
soporific speeches. Still, one wishes that the film's affective charge were
more evenly distributed across the stories. After the alternately transcendent
and hollow shotgun blasts of Dahai's segment, Zhou San's story feels hopelessly
small, banal whether by design or by comparison: his ascetic drifter is no less
a stock character than Ryan Gosling's motorbike-racer-slash-stoic-thug in The Place Beyond the Pines. Where the third segment rests on Zhao's powerful
performance, even in an almost comically obvious sequence where she's slapped
in the face with a stack of bills, the last is similarly marred by an errant
strain of sentimentalism. It hinges on our familiarity with conventional
stories of tragic young men and the hardened young sex workers they love,
counting on us to fill in the sympathetic blanks.
It isn't that Jia uses
these tropes unthinkingly, but rather that their place in his tapestry of a corrupt
modern China, haunted by the moral uprightness and Old World order of the
medieval opera several characters come across in a town square, is too easily
come by. This more refined version of the narrative gamesmanship played by
significantly lesser talents like Alejandro González Iñárritu only registers as
a problem, though, because of the coiled tension and leanness of A Touch of
Sin's powerful stretches, like the drum-accompanied tracking shot that
initiates Dahai's homicidal rampage. Jia's innate gracefulness as a filmmaker
is a surprisingly fine match for these moments of redemptive violence; you'd be
hard pressed to think of a more psychologically astute distillation of the
vigilante's god complex, for instance, than the eerie shot that glides,
bullet-like, from Dahai's weapon to the body it's about to destroy. If the
second and fourth segments feel like allegorical padding, in other words, the
material they're cushioning is well worth the buffer.
