The
Dragons & Tigers Award for Young Cinema at the Vancouver International Film Festival has an illustrious history. Handed out every year since 1994, previous
winners include such now-vitally important filmmakers as Hong Sangsoo, Jia
Zhangke, Kore-eda Hirokazu, Liu Jiayin, Lee Changdong and Wisit Sasanatieng.
Winning the award this year, or should I say last year, was Chinese director Li Luo, for this, his third feature. I managed to see only five
of the eight films in competition but my top choice would have been Song
Fang's Memories Look at Me, with Li's film coming in second (the
others I saw were A Fish, A Mere Life and Moksha:
the World or I, How Does that Work?).
Shot
in a minimalist black and white,
Emperor Visits the Hell is
a modern-day retelling of three chapters from the Ming Dynasty epic
Journey
to the West, one of the
foundational texts of Chinese literature and a
never-ending font of
film and television stories. After the Dragon
King, a local gangster, disobeys an order from Heaven and changes the weather,
he appeals to the Emperor, a government bureaucrat, to protect him from a death
sentence at the hands of Heaven's Executioner. The Emperor, Li Shimen (played
by Li Wen) does his best to protect him, but the Messenger falls asleep and
manages to kill the Dragon King in a dream, which is enough to kill him in
reality. The Dragon King, as a ghost, then haunts the Emperor and causes his death. But,
with the Executioner along to guide him through the underworld, the Emperor
finds away to bribe his way back to life by altering what is written in the
Book of Life and Death, a bureaucratic solution to a supernatural problem. It’s
not that the Emperor breaks the rules, rather he bends them to conform to his
desires. The Dragon King’s crime was outright, the specific defiance of a heavenly
command. The Emperor obeys the rules as written, he just changes the writing,
like Captain Kirk with the Kobayashi Maru. The film ends with the Emperor drunk
and pontificating at a celebratory feast in a loud and crowded restaurant, and here the
distinction between film story and reality itself breaks down, as the actor
begins speaking as himself, rather than his character, a kind of riff on the
ending of Abbas Kiarostami's
Taste of Cherry. Novel, film, reality,
these too are arbitrary categorizations that one with enough power, like a
motion picture director, can render meaningless.
In
presenting its award, the Dragons & Tigers jury cited not only the film’s
“mordant humor” but it’s “audacious integration of multiple levels of
storytelling and filmmaking”, which it most certainly accomplishes. The film
demolishes every border it comes across: dream and reality, past and present, film and literature, fiction
and documentary. The Emperor, a man with both money and governmental authority,
bends reality to his needs, a none-too-subtle crack at the state of
contemporary Chinese society, where the meanings of laws and borders and even
words can change depending on one’s wealth, position and connections. The use of
black and white and the deadpan sense of humor immediately call Jim Jarmusch to
mind, and there’s a blankness to the performances and a just slightly off the
beat editing style that recalls nothing so much as Jarmusch’s masterpiece Dead Man, another film about a trip
through the underworld where the normal rules and structures of reality fail to
apply. It’s this dreamy rhythm that still haunts me nine months later, much more than the film's post-modern satire.
