People Mountain People Sea

人山人海

Hong Kong, 2011, colour, 2.35:1, 90 mins.

Director: Cai Shangjun 蔡尚君.

Rating: 6/10.

Strikingly mounted, existential tale of revenge that’s let down by being over-elliptical.

STORY

Guizhou province, southwest China, the present day. At a remote spot in the mountains by a stone quarry, ex-convict Xiao Qiang (Wu Xibo), 31, knifes dead and robs a young man who has given him a lift on his motorcycle. The dead man’s elder brother, Tie (Chen Jianbin), who has recently returned from working in the city, must pay off a large debt to a now-disabled man because of his negligence while working on a quarry job. Despite that, Tie determines to hunt down Xiao Qiang. He visits Xiao Qiang’s home in a neighbouring village, where he stays with the man’s mother (Du Yun’e) and two children, waiting for him to return. But the mother tells him her son is a coward and won’t come back. Tie goes north, across the provincial border to the city of Chongqing, on the Yangtze River, where he asks the help of an old friend, Bao (Li Hucheng), a drug addict. They hunt through the city’s roughest areas for news of Xiao Qiang, who has a price on his head of RMB10,000, but hit a dead end. Tie helps out Bao with a drugs deal but ends up being cheated of his remaining money and briefly arrested by the police. While in the region, Tie visits his ex-wife, Tian Xin (Tao Hong), who had a son (Zheng Kenan) by him but has since remarried. As her new husband did not want the boy, she’d sent him away to a foster home, but the son has since run away and come home. With her husband away, Tie has sex with Tian Xin, and meets his son for the first time. After returning the boy to the foster home, Tie moves on, meeting an ex-cellmate (Zhang Weidong) of Xiao Qiang who claims he has no information to give him. Returning home empty-handed, Tie is given a collection of money by a local policeman friend (Zhang Xin), who also tells him that Xiao Qiang has been spotted at a mine in the north. Tie gets a job at the mine, whose workers – many of them criminals on the run – run their own underground court of rough justice. When he’s discovered, Xiao Qiang threatens to blow up the mine but is stoned to death by the other miners. With nothing now to live for, Tie hatches a secret plan.

REVIEW

Based on a true story of a couple of years ago, in which the brothers of a murder victim decided to track down the killer themselves, People Mountain People Sea 人山人海 is a simple revenge story with apocalyptic ambitions. In the version by writer-director Cai Shangjun 蔡尚君, it’s about a penniless elder brother who takes the law into his own hands, setting out on a thousand-mile journey from a village in Guizhou province, up to the huge metropolis of Chongqing, and back again on a seemingly hopeless one-man quest. Given the spectacular, mountainous scenery of Guizhou (one of China’s least-developed provinces) and its large empty spaces, the journey naturally becomes an existential one, too, ending in a hellish coal mine which has its own rough justice and of which Dante would have been proud.

The movie is a big leap forward for Cai from his debut, The Red Awn 红色康拜因 (2007), a father-and-son drama that was low on character conflict but compensated with striking photography of summery cornfields in Gansu province and a touching performance by Yao Anlian 姚安濂 as the widower who returns to his village after being registered as dead by his teenage son. In Tie, People has a similar character who’s returned after a long spell away in the big city, but he’s a far less likeable figure and way more taciturn. In fact, the short-on-words figure of Tie sets the tone for the whole film, whose plot, though simple, is still difficult to piece together from the few scraps of information provided (way less than in the movie’s presskit) and the large lacunae in the narrative.

Tie’s physical journeying is only briefly shown. Instead, this is existential cinema of the baldest kind, and in some respects too big a leap forward by Cai (again co-writing with film critic Gu Xiaobai 顾小白). Though never boring or draggy, and with an admirably tight running time, it’s mystifyingly elliptical for no good reason and too often forgets its audience. And though it has sections of almost visionary power that recall Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr – Tie journeying through the landscape to ghoulish music by Zhou Jiaojiao 周佼佼, and the final mine scenes like a vision of Hell – the audience needs much more help on the narrative/character side not to feel emotionally shut out of Tie’s personal quest.

Performances, mostly in thick local dialect, are very much at the service of the film, with actress Tao Hong 陶虹 (A Beautful New World 美丽新世界, 1998) almost unrecognisable in a small role as Tie’s onetime wife and character actor Chen Jianbin 陈建斌 (24 City 二十四城记, 2008; Confucius 孔子, 2009) suitably gruff and monosyllabic as Tie. Though with a different technical crew from The Red Awn, the movie is equally well-appointed. Editing by Yang Hongyu 杨红雨 is crisp, and widescreen photography by Dong Jinsong 董劲松 (11 Flowers 我11, 2011) is top-notch – from village interiors through vast landscapes to the stygian coalmines that make those in Blind Shaft 盲井 (2003) look like a walk in the park. Overall, it’s a film that rates 7/10 for vision and ambition but 6/10 for actual results.

The English title is a literal translation of the Chinese one, a phrase meaning “a sea of people”. Though made by an entirely Mainland crew, the production company is registered in Hong Kong.

CREDITS

Presented by Sunrise Media (HK).

Script: Gu Xiaobai, Cai Shangjun, Gu Zheng. Photography: Dong Jinsong. Editor: Yang Hongyu. Music: Zhou Jiaojiao. Music direction: Dong Wei. Art direction: Zhai Tao, Jin Yang. Costumes: Xu Jianshu [Lawrence Xu]. Make-up: Qiu Zhijuan. Sound: Fu Ling, Pan Xiaolong, Yang Jiang. Visual effects: Lin Lizhu, Zhou Zhou.

Cast: Chen Jianbin (Tie), Tao Hong (Tian Xin, Tie’s ex-wife), Wu Xiubo (Xiao Qiang, murderer), Li Hucheng (Bao/Leopard Man), Zhang Xin (Guizhou policeman), Zheng Kenan (Tie’s younger son), Wang Xun (Chongqing policeman), Bao Zhenjiang (boss), Hou Xiang (Xiangzi), Li Yanming (Tie’s younger brother), Xu Yiqiang (fengshui master), Du Yun’e (Xiao Qiang’s mother), Gao Xiangyang (Tie’s wife), Tian Xinyu (Tie’s older son), Ning Lin (Jiu/Brother Nine), Zhang Weidong (Xiao Qiang’s ex-cellmate).

Premiere: Venice Film Festival (Competition, Surprise Film), 6 Sep 2011

Release: China, 3 Aug 2012; Hong Kong, tba.

(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 10 Sep 2011.)