Xiao Wu
China/Hong Kong 1997
Reviewed by Tony Rayns
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
1997. Liang Xiao Wu is a pickpocket in the town of Fenyang in Shanxi Province, heading a small gang of younger thieves. After helping to retrieve an ID card from a stolen wallet as a favour to a pharmacist friend, he begins turning in all his victims' ID cards. Visiting the pharmacist (whose shop is about to be demolished), he learns his erstwhile best friend Jin Xiaoyong is about to be married. Jin was also a thief but has become a respectable cigarette wholesaler; the local authorities have named him a "model entrepreneur". Jin wants to distance himself from the likes of Xiao Wu and doesn't invite him to the wedding party.
Xiao Wu's relationship with the karaoke-bar hostess Mei-Mei gets off to a rocky start when he complains about her reluctance to sing and dance for him, but she is soon charmed by him and touched by his concern when a stomach bug forces her to miss work. He soon thinks of her as his 'steady' and buys a pager so that she can contact him. But he's humiliated in front of her when Jin returns his wedding present of cash, calling it "dirty money". Xiao Wu buys an expensive ring for Mei-Mei but learns that she has left the karaoke bar with some clients from Taiyuan and moved out of her home. He gives the ring instead to his mother during a visit to his family in the countryside - and is angry when he realises she has sold it to help pay for his younger brother's wedding. There is a family row, and his father throws him out. Back in Fenyang, he is caught trying to steal a wallet because his pager goes off. Arrested, he becomes an object of curiosity for passers-by.
Review
Jia Zhangkes affectionate but dispassionate account of the downfall of a terminal loser is one of the most impressive and achieved Chinese films of the 90s. Even Zhang Yimou, notoriously stingy with praise for other Chinese directors, has acclaimed it. Made on a shoestring budget with an entirely non-professional cast in Jias hometown, its another vindication of underground independent film-making in China and a career-making triumph for its first-time director. The films project can only be called Bressonian. It offers an astutely observed and meticulously detailed vision of lifes material surfaces and social transactions in order to intimate whats happening beneath those surfaces. Fenyang is a typical northern Chinese backwater, a ramshackle provincial town in which an unsophisticated community (only half a rung up from its peasant origins) clamours to embrace the benefits of free-market society, from entrepreneurialism and rebuilding to karaoke bars and hair and beauty salons. With its shops, entertainments and street stalls the town is a magnet for visitors from the surrounding province - which makes it an ideal arena for Xiao Wus pickpocketing operation. Its a society changing almost too rapidly to grasp, in which few of the old certainties and Confucian moral absolutes remain intact. The children of peasant farmers no longer see it as an obligation to stump up for a family wedding; the proprietor of a sleazy karaoke bar has no compunction about voicing rude home truths to a formerly valued customer when he makes a mild complaint.
But Xiao Wu is a man out of tune with his times, an overgrown child who fails to grasp the implications of the police crackdown on street crime and doesnt understand why a former friend who has gone straight might no longer want to know him. By choosing to centre the film on this hapless sad-sack rather than the infinitely more adaptable Jin Xiaoyong, Jia shifts the film away from social observation and on to darker, psychological ground. Xiao Wus sexual and emotional naivety - in a word, his immaturity - are summed up with superb concision by his coy refusals to sing with or for Mei-Mei in the karaoke bar. Half way through the film, Jia sends his protagonist to an otherwise deserted bath-house, shows him naked and vulnerable, and has him sing his heart out in the womb-like security of the hot pool. This is the films turning point. In every sense fully exposed, Xiao Wu as a social being now has nowhere to go but down. He is in short order dumped by Mei-Mei, ejected from his family and arrested by the police. In the brilliant closing sequence he disappears from the frame entirely, present only as an off-screen object for the gaze of indifferent passers-by on the street.
Xiao Wus decline and fall dont occur in a vacuum, but Jia nowhere suggests that hes a victim of social change or an index of what has happened in China since Maos death. His fate is specific and singular. Nor is there any sense that Xiao Wu gains in self-awareness from his own misfortunes; the film is not an improving moral tale. But the juxtaposition of Xiao Wus abasement with the clear-eyed perception of a society in the process of losing its bearings gives the film a curious, hard-to-pin-down purity and makes the spectacle of Xiao Wus sad end strangely exalting. This is what makes the film not only Bressonian but also worthy of mention alongside Bresson. It wouldnt work as well as it does without the naturalistic performances or Yu Lik-Wais cinematography (a small miracle of informal formal control). But its Jia Zhangkes ability to find spiritual truths beneath everyday surfaces that makes the result so special. The China Film Bureau punished Jia for making Xiao Wu without official permission by delaying approval for his second film Zhan Tai/The Platform by more than a year. He is now, at last, shooting it. Lets hope hes able to function as well under the supervision of the authorities as he did when he made Xiao Wu independently.
Credits
- Director
- Jia Zhangke
- Producers
- Li Kitming
- Jia Zhangke
- Screenplay
- Jia Zhangke
- Director of Photography
- Nelson Yu Lik-Wai
- Editor
- Lin Xiaoling
- Art Director
- Liang Jingdong
- ©Radiant Advertising
- Production Companies
- Beijng Film Academy
- Hu Tong Communication & Radiant Advertising jointly present a Wang Hanbing presentation
- Production Manager
- Wang Hongwei
- Assistant Directors
- Gu Zheng
- Zhang Xi
- Script Supervisor
- Luo Sha
- Lighting
- Sam Gu
- Sound
- Lin Xiaoling
- Sound Re-recording
- Zhang Yang
- Cast
- Wang Hongwei
- Hao Hongjian
- Zuo Baitao
- Ma Jinrei
- Liu Junying
- Liang Yonghao
- An Qunyan
- Jiang Dongdong
- Zhao Long
- Wang Reiren
- Gao Jinfeng
- Li Renzhu
- Wu Juan
- Ji Jinshu
- Ren Zhaorui
- Zhang Xiaohua
- Zhang Deping
- Qiao Yingfei
- Wei Xiaoqin
- Qiao Qian
- Zhao Genzhi
- Certificate
- not submitted
- Distributor
- Institute of Contemporary Arts
- 10,170 feet
- 113 minutes
- In Colour
- Subtitles
- [1.37:1]