A Touch Of Sin
Jia Zhangke 2013 China
Starring: Wu Jiang, Zhao Tao, Baoqiang Wang, Lanshan Luo, Vivien Li, Jia-yi Zhang
Hailing a film as different in the modern age is about as trite a description as calling it unique but in the case of A Touch Of Sin the word really is fitting, particularly when you consider its placement in director Jia Zhangke's oeuvre. Since 2006 Jia has worked in documentaries and production and Sin is his return to fiction, albeit a firmly outspoken fiction with its undercurrents closer to overcurrents and taking its inspiration from real-life news stories broken via Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter), a place mostly free of the censorship imposed on the country's general media and with the power to force the hand of state news programmes. It's also far from the fantasy elements of 2004's The World and the realist approach of much of his other work, instead borrowing from his own influences and the cinematic and cultural history of his homeland. In its form the film's loose linked chapters are reminiscent of the way in which the ancient Chinese typically represented historical events across four murals. The title however is a reference to King Hu's 1969 classic A Touch Of Zen, a film Jia readily admits to being a fan of and which he channels in the protagonist of the third episode's (Jia's wife and sort of muse Zhao Tao, who's never less than excellent) blood-soaked literal transformation into a wuxia heroine. In style though it's not the past but the present his images connect to, particularly those of the South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook's hyper stylised revenge fantasies in having his lead characters pushed to murderous extremes and exploring the increasingly blurred morality of current life. In some cases they don't even have to be pushed that hard either, the first murder here (or the first three to be exact) is coolly perpetrated in response to a robbery attempt and then it's not by the initial hero Dahai (a brilliant Wu Jiang, playing bravado in all its realistic incompetence), it's by a man who until the second tale appears to be just a passing motorcyclist. As such Dahai is driven by the moral corruption of a state that appears to be drifting from enforced communism to violently controlled capitalism but soon his integrity is itself contaminated causing him to hit out at all and sundry with a double-barrelled shotgun wrapped in a cloth emblazoned with a roaring tiger (another allusion to wuxia). But of course his attempts to bring about change, as well as those of the other characters, are almost entirely impotent and only Xiaoyu's (Tao) crimes are really necessary. Be it murder, robbery or suicide the world continues to spin and people continue to be exploited so it's pretty inevitable that eventually the film will circle back to the province where it began, Shanxi, showing that Dahai's revolt has changed only the players rather than the game. The only beings who come close to escaping are animals who, despite the cruelty afforded them, are in the end actually raised up above humans with Dahai referring to his oppressors as 'animals' and executing a man he earlier witnessed whipping a horse. It's a powerful, cynical message well delivered and has a lot to say about the prevailing nature of the world - including Britain, where some viewers laugh at such slayings as they did in the screening I attended - but one that's not helped by the sheer tedium of the second section. Many have compared it to Tarantino in its embracing of an irregular narrative, knowledge of genre and stylishly cacophonous assaults, but Jia's film seems more concerned overall with rallying against the cruelty in contemporary society than simply fetishizing it.
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