FROZEN (Jidu hanleng) (director/writer: Wang Xiaoshuai; screenwriter: Ming Pang; cinematographer: Yang Shu; editor: Qing Qing; cast: Jia Hongshen (Qi Lei), Ma Xiaoqing (Shao Yun), Bai Yu (Sister), Li Geng (Sister's Husband), Bai Yefu (Bald Guy), Wei Ye (Longhaired Guy), Zhang Yongning (Lau Ling), 1996-China)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Frozen is an independently produced Chinese film, made during 1994, and it reflects the pessimism the artist community of the post-Tiananmen Square generation felt about the materialistic Communist regime and how the regime stifles free expression. It is a call for artistic freedom, but interestingly enough, this political film shies away from offering any significant political commentary. The director, Wang Xiaoshuai, clashed with the Chinese authorities over the film, since filmmakers in China must go through official channels. He finally took the film secretly to Amsterdam to get it released and took the pseudonym Wu Ming, meaning `No Name.'There is a coldness about this film that prevents it from being a true emotional experience rather than an intellectual response to what the students and avant-garde community in Beijing were feeling at the time.
The story is told in flashback style, of a laconic, stoic, young depressed student, Qi Lei (Jia Hongshen), who is a performance artist and decides that at the beginning of each of the four seasons, to perform a symbolical death ritual, which will culminate in his actual suicide. He starts with a self-burial in the autumn, a water burial for the winter, a burning for the spring, and for the summer, he plans to go through with his actual death, in the form of an ice burial.
It is very difficult to feel anything but regret for his plan of a slow suicide, a martyrdom for the cause, to show how repressive the Communist system is and how tired he is of living. His plan is to use himself as a concept for others to rally around his cause. The world has had too many martyrs already, and his plan is such a cold and calculating one, that three-quarters of the film is boringly spent showing him with his fickle friends, Longhaired Guy (Wei Ye) and Bald Guy (Bai Yefu), his understanding girlfriend, Shao Yun (Ma Xiaoqing), and his cynical physician sister (Bai Yu), whom he sponges off; and, her husband, his wisecracking brother-in-law (Li Geng), who wants to possess his paintings in case he becomes famous after his death. Only Qi Leng's mentor, the art critic Lau Ling (Zhang Yongning) -- Shao Yun's ex-lover -- seems to approve of what Qi is doing.
The film opens at a posthumous exhibition of Qi Lei's art work, where the attendance is good for the first day, but interest in his death soon wanes. He will be shown communicating with the other students and performance artists, who either do not act favorably to his plan or remain quiet. A performance artist eats a bar of soap with a knife and fork and is revolted by what he eats, almost as much as the audience is revolted by seeing him go through that routine. A fortune teller mysteriously mentions that he will be reborn, that one life leads to another. His friend, Longhair Guy, thinks he might be having mental problems and brings him to a mental-health clinic so he can be dissuaded from committing suicide, but a mistake in identity occurs and the doctor takes him for the patient, Qi Lei. This was a hard scene to swallow as not being a contrived one and a very forced metaphor on the political situation, though it provided some much needed levity rather than any particular increase in political insights.
The last 20 minutes of the film offers a surprise twist to the story and thereby saves it somewhat from the doldrums it was in. It results in a film that gets its message across that freedom is frozen in China, that things are still far from democratic. It was a though-provoking film, but in a very manipulative way, that was none too pleasing to view despite its good intentions.
REVIEWED ON 5/30/2000 GRADE: C-
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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