Colours of China
R. UMA MAHESHWARI
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A cluster of Chinese films screened in the city recently mirrored the changing urban lifestyles in the country.
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ORIENTAL FLAVOURS Stills from movies shown at the festival.
China seems to be the flavour of the season. Amidst talk of closer ties between India and China the Hyderabad Film Club chose an apt moment for celebrating Chinese cinema. A delightfully variegated fare of nine films was screened at the Sarathi Studios preview theatre between June 12 and 18.
Barring one (The Lin's Family Store), all the films were those made between 1990s and 2005. The festival began with Cell Phone, by Feng Xiaogang, an interesting comment on the possibilities of both `connect' and `disconnect' via the cell phone. Cell Phone combines a fine sensibility and keen sense of observation of idiosyncrasies of urban lifestyles. While on the one hand the cell phone helps build bridges of physical and perhaps emotional distance it can also precipitate situations that cause distances between people.
The director zooms in on the life of famous TV personality Yan Shouyi and indirectly at his friend Fei. Yan Shouyi — ably assisted by his tool, the cell phone — habitually dodges between different women in is life — girlfriends and wife. The accessories help him devise methods of playing the game with ιlan. He can delete numbers, messages, and names. He can erase memories and moments but at the same time gets caught `in the act' through a more innovative cell phone his girlfriend possesses.
The paradox is seen when his grandmother passes away and the cell phone is not in his possession. A pithy comment on technology and the reality of distances is made by Shouyui's writer friend Fei "now people are so close, we have trouble breathing..." Shouyui loses his wife, girlfriends and is doomed to a lonely, ageing life. His niece pays him a visit with the latest gadget, another cell phone, with a camera freezing his image, lost to the world.
Not One Less by Yimou Zhang (1999) is set in a mountain village in China with a small school, with a single teacher. He has to leave for a month on a personal emergency but must find a substitute to take classes in his absence. The substitute, a 13-year-old poor girl Wei Minzhi, must struggle to retain every single student of the class till the teacher returns, for the ten Yuan he has promised her. But Wei's real adventure happens with trying to bring back one of the class boys who has gone to the city, only to become a beggar. Ten Yuan is what she wants, but in the process she has learnt the lessons of being a teacher in the toughest circumstances.
Spring Subway by Zhang Yibai is an urban film, with attitude and set in fast paced, urban Beijing, with two young protagonists. Made in 2002, the film moves through the individual lives of Chen Jianbin and Liu Xiaohui, a young couple in love, who move into Beijing after graduation from a university in South China. Their life, which assumes a status quo after seven years of romantic wedded bliss, changes when Chen finds himself jobless, and unable to bring himself to tell Liu the truth. He hides the fact for three months, building on the bluff each passing day. He drops her to work and returns as usual, via the subway. Their story is played out in the subway, besides their home, where the distances between them grows beyond measure each day. Her friendship with a new friend in the subway increases Chen's insecurity and hurts his male ego, to reach a point where his marriage can no longer be saved. The subway is a metaphor for both the pace of a consumerist urban lifestyle — of distances made and distances covered in between two subways, between people. Xiohui finds an interesting digression from her now monotonous wedded life; and Chen finds space for enacting the drama of going to and back from work each day, as he watches other dramas unfold.
Colours of the Blind by Chen Guoxing — with excellent photography — is about the visually challenged Ding Lihua who is spotted by a coach for training as an athlete in a sports school for the physically challenged. The coach trains her to win the race against time despite her handicap, but still refuses to see her as anything but a blind woman, and finds it difficult to accept her love for him as a woman. She has seen all the colours in her blindness — of love, of victory against odds, while he remains blind to her most essential side, that of a woman in love.
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