Apparently, part of China looks very much like Appalachia: muscular green rivers flow in deep green gorges. Towns occupy river valleys and extend for dilapidated miles between the river and the steep, shaggy bluffs. The economy seems based on coal, but no one seems to have a job. Young men hang out in squalid pool-halls and ride motor-scooters that don't start reliably. There are even hillbillies of a particularly rustic sort, the Miao ethnic group -- people once renowned for their ability to play "Lusheng pipes", although this skill has been mostly abandoned: the kids favor second-hand electric guitars with battered speakers, traveling to gigs crammed into the back of old, dilapidated pick-up trucks. Train tracks snake along the river bottoms, frequently passing through long tunnels and there is an unsteady-looking suspension bridge spanning the bright green river. The landscape is like the terrain around Pittsburgh or Wheeling,West Virginia -- no one seems to have any money or any hope. This is the place where Bi Gan's Kaili Blues is set, filmed with such intensity that you can almost smell the sub-tropical rot and squalor. Released in 2015, Kaili Blues is a remarkable debut feature film for the young director -- I think he was 25 when the picture was made. The movie is an intricate puzzle picture: on second viewing, the broad contours of the enterprise are visible, but I'm still not clear what the movie is supposed to mean or, even, if the concept of thematic subject matter has any relevance to the picture at all. Throughout the movie, a voice intones poems, all of them written by Bi Gan, although attributed to the character named Chen in the picture. The short poems are surrealist in nature, very densely written, and hard to follow when spoken in voice-over. I'm not certain that careful study of this verse would yield any clearly articulable meaning -- rather, the poems seem comprised of atmospheric mists of words, striking evanescent images that don't exactly cohere in terms of any meaning that can be paraphrased. The film operates in a similar manner -- the images, often astonishing, are organized according to certain principles involving repetition, a sort of visual rhyming. But whether these images, taken together, coalesce into a meaning that can be paraphrased is unclear to me. The movie is visually beautiful and contains striking sequences and, so, it is pleasant enough to study. But, at the outset, Bi Gan offers a warning: there is a long citation from the Diamond Sutra that tells us that Buddha understands the thought of all beings because, in effect, there is no thought; this is because the thought that is past can not be retrieved, the thought that is future is not available to be grasped, and the thought of the present always eludes us in the moment. Obviously, this quote is an admonition to the viewer.
Kaili Blues presents more of a situation than a plot although the film is filled with occurrences of various kinds. (An example of these occurrences is the periodic appearance of white dog owned by someone nicknamed Pisshead -- in an early scene, the dog warily circles a fire-pit on a terrace at a medical clinic. The scene is bathed in deep colors and the orange of the fire is more orange than anything you've ever seen.) A sad older man named Chen works at a clinic. At first, we see him as a patient and there is a suggestion that he is infected somehow. Later, we find that Chen is a physician of sorts himself despite a background that includes nine years in prison. Through bits of dialogue, we come to understand that Chen has a half-brother nicknamed Crazy Face. Crazy Face has a son named Weiwei. The little boy is neglected, left alone at home with the admonition that he should do his homework. Chen is close to Weiwei and concerned that Crazy Face is going to sell the child to a local gangster called the Monk. When Weiwei vanishes, Chen decides to go to a place called Zhenyuan where the Monk has supposedly taken the boy. Chen also agrees to deliver a message from the elderly lady doctor with whom he practices. "Before the Cultural Revolution", she says that she had a lover named Lin Airen. She has lost touch with this man, but believes he lives in Zhenyuan. Chen agrees to deliver a shirt to Lin Airen -- it's a private joke between the lady doctor and Lin Airen: they agreed that whoever left Kaili first would be given a shirt by the other person. Through some half-overheard conversation, we learn that Monk owed money to another gangster. The other gangster cut off Monk's son's hand and, then, buried the child alive. Curiously, Chen accepts the justice of burying the boy alive, but can't reconcile himself with cutting off the boy's hand. It seems that Chen may have taken revenge on the gangster who mutilated and killed Monk's son -- apparently, this is why he spent nine years in jail. (The jail was a coal mine where workers were routinely beaten.) Chen and his half-brother Crazy Face quarrel over the upkeep on their mother's grave. There is a house in dispute between them. We learn that Chen's wife died when he was in prison. Then, at about thirty minutes into the film, the title appears: Kaili Blues.
The first part of the film is clearly and beautifully shot and makes a certain kind of elliptical sense. We hear poems on the sound track recited by Chen and there are strange images that can't exactly be reconciled to anything in the narration. A train seems to sweep by Crazy Face's hovel, projected on curtains -- it's not clear if this is a real train or some sort of hallucination. Chen dreams of his mother's slippers drifting away under water. (His mother abandoned him when he was a small boy and he was raised on the streets of Kaili -- the slipper sinking into the green river seems an image of the boy's abandonment). In a pool hall, there's a red table onto which water seems to pour -- an obvious homage to Tarkovsky and an image that signifies that what we are seeing is a memory. There's a tunnel in which a banana vendor pushes a cart sometimes toward the camera and, sometimes, away into the shadows.
Chen takes a train to a reservoir in the mountains. A man who was formerly a gangster drives Chen down to a place named Dangmai. (It seems to be a sort of roadside café.) Chen remembers prison and tells an anecdote about how he was beaten over a misunderstanding that now seems comical to him. A wild man seems to be out and about. (We learn this by a radio account) People are terrorized by the wild man. Before he vanished, Weiwei was afraid of the creature and thought it would attack him at home. The wild man has accosted a motorist and caused a terrible accident in which a bit of Batik tapestry was damaged. (There is a later inserted shot showing odd images on the Batik). At Dangmai, we see a young man with a motorscooter with blue buckets strapped to its back. A pretty young girl tries to get a ride with the young man but he can't get the motorscooter to start -- throughout the movie no one can get their vehicles to reliably start and there are periodic power outages. The scene at Dangmai initiates an extended take that lasts for 45 minutes, a single shot somewhat like Alexander Sokurov's film Russian Ark -- but, if anything, even more complex and arduous. The shot is made with a sort of fish-eye lens that slightly distorts the image, blurring it a little at the sides, and involves several extended motor-scooter rides and, then, tracking shots in Zhenyuan, a place that looks more or less indistinguishable from the wretched Kaili. Sometimes, the camera deserts Chen to follow other figures, including the pretty young girl who turns out to be a hair stylist and would-be tour-guide -- periodically, she recites facts and figures about Kaili, including annual rainfall, temperature range, and the size of the city (she is rehearsing for the tours she hopes to lead). The sequence shot includes an interlude with Miao people, an impromptu concert on the street in which Chen sings (poorly) a song called "Little Jasmine Flower". At one point, the pretty young hair dresser, Yang Yang, walks through some alleys, takes a ferry across the river (about a 100 yard ride over a turbulent-looking green river). She buys a whirligig and, then, crosses the river again on a swinging bridge to attend the Miao rock 'n roll show where Chen is singing the pop tune. The boy with the blue buckets strapped to his bike takes Chen back up the hill to Dangmai and the shot ends where it began -- 45 minutes later. On the way back up the hill, Chen says that "It's like a dream" and asks the boy driving the motorbike for his name. The boy says that he's Weiwei, now grown to be a teenager. Chen goes to a place where a wholesale banana vendor has a kind of mansion standing over what seem to be sugar cane fields and bamboo thickets. He learns that Weiwei is safe with the banana wholesaler who has bought the boy from Crazy Face and is raising him. The banana vendor may also be a watch repairman. This correlates to earlier scenes in which we have learned that Weiwei is obsessed with clocks, draws them on walls, and inks them on his wrist. In one uncanny shot, we watch a hand-drawn watch seem to tell time by a shadow cast from where it is nailed to a wall. I don't know if the banana wholesaler and the watch repairman are one or two people. (The people's faces all look alike to me because, of course, they are Chinese and so parts of the film were unintentionally confusing simply because I couldn't tell the people apart). It seems that Chen sights Weiwei as a little boy, looking at him through binoculars and, at one point, we see a procession of Miao people marching single file and playing hooked instruments that must be Lusheng pipes. Chen learns that the lady doctor's boyfriend has died about a year earlier. He leaves Zhengyuen on a train -- the train looks like the ghost train we saw passing Crazy Face's hovel an hour earlier. Chen falls asleep and the move suddenly ends.
The summary is clearer than the film and I will probably have to watch it several more times to understand all of the intricate cross-references between the single take tracking shot in Zhenyuan and the opening hour-long sequence in Kaili. The long tracking shot is a virtuosic display that, in fact, creates an indescribable sensation of disorientation and somehow seems to suspend time -- it's clear that the tracking shot somehow takes place in several different times (Weiwei is either a little boy or a teenager) and implicates different motifs from the Kaili scenes. Clearly, the film is similar to Tarkovsky's Stalker -- the hero enters a kind of "zone" when he leaves Dangmai on the back of the motorcycle. Time is "sculpted" to use the Tarkovsky phrase in the long tracking shot -- Chen seems to slip from one time to another encountering earlier (and possibly later) versions of characters that we have seen earlier. Curiously enough, the film reminds me most directly of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo's unutterably mysterious short novel Pedro Paramo -- in that book, a man is sent by his mother on a mission to the town where he was born and raised. He reaches the town and interacts with its inhabitants and, then, gradually comes to understand that the town is abandoned, its buildings deserted and falling apart, and that the people that he encounters are all ghosts stubbornly clinging to vestiges of their tragic past. Kaili Blues has much the same flavor. The immense tracking shot also seems an allusion to Chinese landscape painting done on long scrolls -- the scroll presents a continuous panorama of mountains and rivers with small villages, Taoist immortals strolling near fairy tale pavilions and wild peaks and forests. We seem to traverse the painted landscape as we unroll the continuous scroll. The film engages both sight and sound -- an example is a scene in Kaili in which the protagonist is trying to start a motorbike; he tries to kickstart the bike several times with no success but, then, we hear an engine rev. But the bike still doesn't move. The camera slowly tracks to the side where we see that the engine belongs to a bright yellow front-end loader on a flat bed. The film then documents the bizarre way that the front end loader descends from the flat bed. When the camera tilts back to where the motorbike was located, the man and cycle are gone -- apparently, while we were engaged in watching the front end loader come down from the flatbed, the motorbike started and has been driven away. This is an odd sequence, basically a non sequitur, but curiously interesting and beautifully shaped. Kaili Blues is strange but not pretentious -- it's never dull and the mysteries that it presents are fascinating, although I'm not certain that they have any rational solution. Yet, unlike many films, the movie's astonishing beauty repays several close watchings even if we aren't sure exactly what we are seeing.
No comments:
Post a Comment