On Tsui Hark's Green Snake

Tsui Hark merges the punk outrage of his early films with the lavish, effects-driven wuxia of his later, much more financially successful works in this pointed denunciation of the hypocrisies both sexual and racial of China's religious traditions, the backward superstitional blindness of Taoism and the calcification of Buddhism into a rules-based organizational structure that has forgotten the most basic rule of all major religions and moral philosophies: "Be excellent to each other."

Based on an oft-told story of two snakes who over 500+ years master enough kung fu that they're able to transform into humans, Tsui shifts focus from the usual hero of the story, the White Snake (played by Joey Wang) who falls in love with a hapless but decent young scholar, to her younger sister the Green Snake (Maggie Cheung), who is much more suspicious of the benefits of becoming human in the first place. As the White Snake's tragic fairy tale plays itself out in self-sacrifice and honor and all those things myths tell us are important, the Green Snake sees only the lies and corruptions of the self-righteous and ultimately decides she'd rather be a snake.

The villain of the film is a super-powerful Buddhist monk who has made it his mission to keep non-humans and humans separate. Whether the non-humans are enlightened or not, whether they are moral or not, makes no difference. His xenophobia is pure. Similarly, his belief system demands that he totally repress any sexual desires he may have. The Green Snake challenges him on this and succeeds in turning him on. Surely any god would understand, seeing as she's Maggie Cheung, of course. But rather than accept his defeat with humility, he lashes out in anger and refuses to uphold his end of their wager. He then kidnaps the scholar, forcing the young man into what can only be described as a Buddhist re-education camp (shades of the Cultural Revolution here), where he is literally rendered insensate by the mindless chanting of the monks (it's a kind of spell where, deep in meditation, the monks' ability to see, hear and speak is removed).

Eventually there is a final battle in which the snakes, in self-protection, unleash a violent flood. The monk lifts the mountain holding his monastery above the waters, destroying the nearby town and killing hundreds of people. Out of a mad desire for doctrinal purity, he tries to rise above the flood of emotion and worldly desire, only to cause mass destruction. I couldn't help but be reminded of The Missing Picture, Rithy Panh's documentary about the Khmer Rouge that was one of my favorite films at this year's Vancouver International Film Festival. The Khmer Rouge, like the Cultural Revolution, were human catastrophes on a massive, almost unimaginable scale, driven by the desire for ideological purity above all else. In a hyperkinetic fantasy film driven by Maggie Cheung and Joey Wang playing sexy snake/humans, Tsui presents much the same critique. But he seems to have mellowed a bit from the nihilistic explosiveness of the Hong Kong New Wave from 15 years earlier (best exemplified in his third film, and one of his greatest, Dangerous Encounters - First Kind). Rather than seeing the world as hopelessly corrupted and in need of burning down (the way the monk sees normal humans in the films remarkable opening sequence: ugly, deformed, lower beings), Green Snake offers the possibility that we might someday become decent enough for her to return. All we need to do is learn to prioritize basic human decency over the dictates of the arbitrary rules and regulations of our organizing institutions and ideologies.

VIFF 2013: Yumen

Part of my on-going coverage of VIFF 2013. Here is an index.

The Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab is apparently bent on domination of the documentary world, or at least its cutting edge. While Lucien Castaing-Taylor has taken the film world by storm with his Sweetgrass and now Leviathan (co-directed with Verena Paravel), films about sheepherding and fishing that have become minor hits of the avant-garde, respectively, JP Sniadecki has been working in China, producing a number of films including last VIFF's People's Park (co-directed with Libbie Cohn) and now Yumen (co-directed with Xu Ruotao and Huang Xiang). The HSEL also produced Manakamana, which played the fest after I left but has also received rave reviews, and I'm pretty sure I saw a credit thanking them on A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness. All of these films (that I've seen) are notable for their use of sound, and Sniadecki in particular seems interested in the clashing of sounds, in the discordances between sound and image that can create unexpected meanings.

In People's Park, this manifested itself in a kind of filmed version of early 20th century American composer Charles Ives's experiments, best heard in Central Park in the Dark, where a three-dimenensional soundscape is created traverses and ordinary park and picks up all the sounds of music and chatter and laughter that one would hear (in the film this is accomplished in one single roving take through the park). Ives's father, a quirky local band leader, used to march two separate bands in opposite directions around a square, listening for the discordances and unexpected harmonies as their different tunes slowly came together and broke apart. Ives's work is full of such clashes, with bits of popular or folk tunes blended into a larger, more classically structured whole. Note that the integration of folk tunes into classical composition neither began or ended with Charles Ives, but Ives seems more interested in rupturing or fracturing the whole than someone like Brahms was in incorporating Eastern European folk melodies into catchy Hungarian Dances, to take one example.

Yumen is a similarly fractured whole, not just in soundtrack, but in narrative as well. Lying somewhere between documentary and fiction, it follows a handful of people as they wander around the ruins of a mid-20th Century industrial area, a hospital and some apartment buildings near an abandoned oil field. Shot in a scratchy 16mm that occasionally burns out in flashes of color (an effect used as well in La última película), the narrative builds from the ground up as we slowly piece together who the characters are via their bizarre actions (painting faces on walls, standing naked on pillars, dancing) and the narration which appears to be townspeople recalling the stories and history of the town, either form their personal experience or local legend. Mixed in as well seemingly at random (but of course not) are snippets of popular music or sound from TV programs. Yumen is located in the same Gansu province, in Western China, that is the subject of Chai Chunya's Four Ways to Die in My Hometown, and like that film it depicts the area as a cultural crossroads, a wholly unique mixture of ancient and modern, of Chinese and outside influences. But where Chai's film is suffused with the mysteries of  Tibetan Buddhism and the mystical Sufi strain of Islam, along with other more primal legends and imagery, Yumen mystifies recent history, making the industrial world as magically ghost-ridden and full of possibility as the pre-modern past.

It's an unfortunate irony that movies like this, so dense and challenging to take in and unpack at times, can largely only be seen in film festivals, smashed together against so many other films (four a day for a week, for me) that without careful notes, or a superhuman ability to write coherently quickly, details can easily be lost or forgotten. But on the other hand, sometimes those clashes produce serendipitous comparisons (I've already compared this one to three other festival films, a fourth is Yang Zhengfan's Distant, a long-take film that sources sound in unexpected, and very different ways). As the festival recedes into my past, certain things, movies or simply moments within movies, tend to separate in my memory and stand in stark relief from the general wash, moments that take root and plant themselves in my consciousness. I don't know if this is necessarily a marker of greatness in a film, but it seems like it should be.

The highlight of Yumen, and one of my favorite moments of the festival, comes near the end, when one of the girls who had been wandering the ruins takes a walk through the market of the village that remains behind in the wake of the vanished industrial boom. It's a single long take, tracking backwards as she moves towards the camera. She's listening to an iPod and singing along quietly to the song, Bruce Springsteen's My Hometown.