The Bird People in China

The Bird People in China – Takeshi Miike directed this film in 1998. Miike is a fantastically prolific Japanese film maker. Typically, he works in genre films – Yakuza, samurai, and horror pictures. His films are famous for their over-the-top and relentless violence. Miike seems to have grasped at an early stage that genre films in the age of spectacle – that is, the age of the “thrill ride picture” – must follow the logic of excess; the effects, the gore, the level of violence must be operatic and must “top” what has gone before. Curiously enough, Miike’s The Bird People in China, which is a kind of mystical comedy, completely disavows this logic and the result is a film that is surprising on all levels. A Japanese salary-man is sent by his company to a remote and mountainous part of Hunan province. His objective is to scout a village where deposits of high-grade jade are reported to have been discovered. An ancient inscription suggests that there are “bird people” – that is, men and women that fly in that region. The salary-man’s trip into the interior of China becomes increasingly arduous. He flies from Tokyo, takes a crowded train to a ramshackle provincial capital, and, then, proceeds by van (it literally falls apart as they are riding in it), by foot, and, finally, on a bizarre raft propelled by giant turtles into a spectacular vertical landscape of pinnacles, cloud-forests, and immense raging rivers. The salary-man is shadowed by a Yakuza who has come to collect tribute (in the form of jade) that the company owes his boss. The Yakuza casually beats everyone up, threatens them with his gun, and provides a comic side-kick to the increasingly disoriented salary-man. He is also suffering from nightmares due to a bloody shootout in which he was involved and seems dangerously unstable; the shoot-out, recalled in a nightmare, gives Miike an opportunity to tweak his audience’s expectations with a little of his patented ultra-violence. When the men finally reach the village, they find that the people recall a “birdman” that came to them from the sky and lived among them. The “birdman’s” granddaughter has made canvas wings and is attempting to teach the local children how to fly. The film is a variant on the myth of Shangri-La – the unspoiled mountain kingdom entirely isolated from the modern world where people live in harmony with nature and have magical powers. Of course, the salary-man and the Yakuza both are intensely affected by the village and, ultimately, the gangster decides that he must protect the place, by violence if necessary, from the encroachment of the modern world. At the very end of the film, we learn that the salary-man has gone back to Tokyo and that he is narrating the story from the perspective of late middle age – thirty years have lapsed. The film is fantastically beautiful – the mountains with their enormous violent rivers, zip-lines and hanging bridges, with terraces and ancient ruinous buildings look like the Andes around Machu Piccha; the river is like the ferocious brown flood of the Urubamba as shown in Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, a film that the Miike’s picture invokes from time to time. (The image of a huge river-turtle rolling like a big wheel down a steep ravine is like the shot of the mule falling from the trail in the beginning of Herzog’s movie.) Birdpeople begins at breakneck speed with a spectacular montage establishing the characters and, then, relaxes into a much slower, more contemplative pace once the characters begin their trek. The theme that Miike explores in the picture is the myth that an isolated place can be completely pure and free from outside influences. As it happens, the legend of the birdman derives from a Scottish pilot flying for the Canadian RAF who crashed in the mountains during the Second World War. He is the birdman and his granddaughter sings a haunting Scottish folk song that becomes the soundtrack for the film. The ancient myth, in fact, derives from earlier contamination of this mountain paradise. A film parallel to the notion that any place (or movie) can be free from outside influence seems to have blinded critics, who have lauded the films’ originality, to the fact that it is a remake of Bill Forsythe’s beautiful Local Hero (1983). In Local Hero, a Houston oil company sends a salary man to a remote Scottish village; the salary-man is supposed to buy a beach where oil has been discovered. The legend of the bird men in Miike’s film correlates to mermaids thought to inhabit the waters near the Scottish village – and the romantic interest in Local Hero, an oceanographer, has webbed feet and may be a mermaid herself. (The little girl in Miike’s film wears wings and, perhaps, can fly). Local Hero is a better film and more carefully argued, but The Bird People of China is very good on its own terms, more poetic and melancholy in some ways, and certainly stranger and more exotic. There are oddities in Miike’s picture that resist interpretation – the hero becomes obsessed with translating the folk song that the little girl sings, there are episodes involving hallucinogenic mushrooms, the village in Bird People is like the village in Brigadoon, it can’t quite be seen. The only traces of the village are terraces, a trail that leads to a huge cliff, and one hut perched over a gorge in the severely vertical landscape. Parts of the film don’t make much sense but there are great visionary scenes and the image of theYakuza having grown old in defending the village, his bare back brilliant with the tattoo of a God and his hair turned grey, looking down over the abyss is only one of many spectacular sights that the film offers.