CANNES - The Hollywood Reporter

REVIEWS
Zhou San (Wang)
is more menacing
than he first
appears.
A Touch of Sin
China returns to the Cannes competition with Jia Zhang-ke’s
sobering view of festering discontent as the gap between the
country’s rich and poor expands BY DAVID ROONEY
THE WIDENING CHASM OF SOCIAL INEQUALITY
separating the moneyed powerbrokers from the struggling
masses — not to mention the despair and violence bred
by that disparity — is a subject of saddening universality.
Exploring those thematic lines in A Touch of Sin (Tian Zhu
Ding), Chinese auteur Jia Zhang-ke only occasionally strikes chords
that resonate, despite having distinguished himself as one of the most
perceptive chroniclers of his country’s transition into 21st century
nationhood in films like Platform and The World.
The English-language title of his seventh narrative feature is a play
on King Hu’s 1971 martial-arts epic, A Touch of Zen. And while that
seems more an homage than a significant structural inspiration, there
certainly are genre elements here that are new to Jia’s work. But tonal
inconsistency, lethargic pacing and a shortage of fresh insight dilute
the storytelling efficacy of this quartet of loosely interconnected episodes
involving ordinary people pushed over the edge.
As always, the visual compensations are considerable thanks to
regular cinematographer Yu Lik-wai, whose eye for arresting detail is
equally sharp whether trained on natural landscapes, assembly-line
industrial communities, bleak mining towns or the crumbling remnants
of China’s past.
While the distinctions among the four far-flung principal settings
and their various dialects will mean little to audiences unversed in
Chinese geography and linguistics, a strong sense does emerge of a
rootless populace displaced by sweeping cultural change and economic
necessity. When one character living paycheck-topaycheck
responds to the suggestion of trying his luck
abroad by saying that the rest of the world is broke, and
that’s why so many are descending on China, the sardonic
edge to Jia’s observation will be lost on nobody.
The film opens with a punchy bout of bloodshed as
three kids brandishing hatchets hold up passing motorcyclist
Zhou San (Wang Baoqiang). But they are foiled
when he pulls out a gun and dispatches them. That
drifter resurfaces later in the least focused of the film’s
four narrative strands.
More satisfying is the story of coalmining company
employee Dahai (Jiang Wu), a disgruntled former classmate
of the corporate boss, who, along with the village
officials, has forgotten his promises of profit sharing
while whizzing around on his private jet. Having failed
to convince the firm’s accountant to expose its financial
inequities, Dahai disrupts the media moment of the
chief’s return to town, met by a committee of ceremonial
drummers and workers incentivized to look happy.
In one of the film’s more startling bursts of violence, he
gets reprimanded with a metal spade to the head.
The other compelling section has frequent Jia muse
Zhao Tao as Xiao Yu as a receptionist in a sauna. Jia
sets up the knife in her rucksack a little too pointedly.
But there’s a captivating momentum to the accumulation
of frustrations that lead her to use it on an arrogant
massage customer who refuses to accept that she’s
strictly front desk-only.
The fourth and final chapter concerns Xiao Hui (Luo
Lanshan), a feckless young man who inadvertently
causes an accident and is to be docked for the salary of
his injured co-worker for the duration of his hospitalization.
This prompts him to flee to a succession of shortlived
jobs — including one as a greeter at a sex club called The Golden
Age, featuring hostesses in sexy versions of Chinese military uniforms.
In that concluding section, glimpses of tech factories in the international
free-enterprise town of Dongguan inevitably conjure associations
with the controversial plants where Apple products are manufactured.
Jia emphasizes the dehumanizing aspect of these environments by
showing a grim worker-housing complex called Oasis of Prosperity. The
fact that wealth and influence are accessible only to the privileged few
is acknowledged throughout the film with a borderline heavy hand.
The four fictionalized plot strands have their roots in real-life tabloid
cases involving three murders and a suicide. But as assembled here,
they make for a schematic narrative patchwork with scant emotional
involvement. Many similar points about the growing discontent in postreform
China have been made more trenchantly by Jia in his other
films, and the use of traditional opera as a mocking counterpoint to
contemporary experience now seems somewhat pat.
Despite solid performances and haunting images, there’s a disappointing
banality to the film. Either the Dahai or the Xiao Yu story might have
benefited from more robust development to make a standalone drama.
But incorporated into this too-diffuse examination of escalating violence
in a recklessly modernized society, their impact is dulled.
In Competition
Cast Zhao Tao, Jiang Wu, Wang Baoqiang, Luo Lanshan
Director-screenwriter Jia Zhang-ke // 133 minutes
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 53