XIAO WU (1998)
3 out of ****
Starring Wang Hongwei, Hao Hongjian, Zuo Baitao;
Written & Directed by Jia Zhangke;
Cinematography by Yu Lik-wai
One becomes accustomed to seeing the world on screen distorted by the conventions of cinematic "realism," so it is rather a shock to see a movie which resembles life as it might actually be lived. XIAO WU is a low-budget Chinese film which opens a window onto small-town China. It gives us a view unobstructed by the things which distance most movies from actuality: no narrative structure, no famous actors, no technical polish. It is not a documentary, but it might as well be.
It is set in Fenyang, a dusty provincial town not likely to be found in any tourist brochures. Fenyang is director Jia Zhangke's hometown, and his actors are non-professionals. Town and people are presented with a spare, unglamourous style which emphasizes above all what this place is like, seemingly without exaggeration and certainly without romanticization. Xiao Wu is a pickpocket living a rather aimless existence in the town. The movie follows him through the days and nights of his life.
Xiao Wu's former partner in crime is now a respectable businessman--which is to say, he sells cigarettes. He is getting married. Xiao Wu, an embarrassing reminder of the businessman's past, is not invited to the wedding. Sometime in their past, Xiao Wu promised a gift to his former friend. To honour his promise, he shows up before the wedding reception and offers his gift. The two men sit down in a back room and have an awkward conversation, seen as one long unbroken take. It is one of the film's best scenes, capturing the two men's respective characters with precision, suggesting the weight of the emotional history between them without verbalizing it.
But the film does not stitch scenes like this into a larger design. We witness a succession of incidents in Xiao Wu's life, related only by the fact that they all happen to the same man and they all serve the film's political agenda (like most Chinese movies seen in the West these days, it is a harsh critique of communism). Xiao Wu goes to a brothel and befriends a prostitute. He has dinner with his family. He falls under the suspicion of the local chief of police after some ID cards are stolen. There is no sense of imposed narrative, no sense that the film is moving toward closure. Instead, there are long unbroken takes which ignore the demands of drama.
A representative sequence: Xiao Wu and the prostitute he is sort of dating sit together in bed. They talk. They are silent. They smoke. The smoke drifts in the air. Background sounds from the street emphasise the silence in the room. She sings. They smoke some more. Smoke drifts. She asks Xiao Wu to sing. He demurs, embarrassed. The camera never moves.
The movie as a whole is similar in approach: it lets things happen, not forcing them in any particular direction. Xiao Wu purchases a pager. His girlfriend has his number. One day, he goes to the apartment she shares with some other prostitutes and discovers that she has gone away with some men from the city. He waits for her to page him. Each time his pager goes off, we wait for it to be her, expecting a resolution to their relationship. But she never pages him. That's not the way this movie works.
The thrust of the film, instead, is simply to _see_ Xiao Wu. He is under our scrutiny throughout the film, which strips away the clutter and distraction of plot and laboured symbolism and postcard photography, and is instead content to observe. This impulse toward exposure becomes literal at one point, when Xiao Wu is alone in a public bathhouse. We see him fully naked. He sings--something he has refused to do in public, in front of his girlfriend. It is here that XIAO WU crystallizes into the epiphanous vision of one man's private life that it strives to be.
It is easy to become impatient with the film's methods, but what it accomplishes, in the end, is rare. We are given some obscure understanding of Xiao Wu's existence, freed of moralizing or generalizations. He is not a victim or a hero or an everyman. He is himself. That is XIAO WU's triumph: it shows a man who is no more than what he is. It shows us what it is that makes him, like all of us, unique.
Subjective Camera (subjective.freeservers.com) Movie Reviews by David Dalgleish (daviddalgleish@yahoo.com)
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