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Grain in Ear
Mangzhong [GRAIN] China, South Korea, 2005, 110 min, 35mm North American Premiere Directed By: Zhang Lu PRODS: Choi Doo-Young, Guan Qin, Liu Yonghong, Gao Hongnu SCR: Zhang Lu CAM: Liu Yonghong ED: Kim Sun-Min CAST: Liu Lianji, Jin Bo, Zhu Guangxuan, Wang Tonghui |
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Cui Shunji sells kimchi from an unlicensed cart; it’s a popular dish in this northern Chinese town. She’s a Korean-Chinese woman bringing up her young son alone in a rented room (next door to a gaggle of blowsy hookers), just barely getting by. Then good things start to happen to her: she meets a married Korean-Chinese man and starts seeing him for sex, and a kindly cop helps her get a license for her cart. But Shunji remains essentially powerless, and when things start to go wrong she can’t help becoming a victim. Her revenge is extreme, and pitiless... Much less quietly droll than his debut Tang Poetry, this finds Zhang Lu entering the territory Fassbinder once made his own: melodrama with a social conscience, executed with slightly shell-shocked restraint. The climactic act of revenge is inspired by a real-life incident in China’s recent past, but the context is pure fiction: this is a social-realist fable which illuminates the gap between haves and have-nots in ways that Marx never dreamed of. Zhang still thinks in cine-formalist terms (the camera never moves until the very end of the film) but he’s clearly edging towards an engagement with drama. The mother-son relationship here is very credible, and Shunji’s dealings with the men sexual and otherwise get awfully close to emotional truths. Tang Poetry (03) |
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