Striding into the Wind

野马分鬃

China, 2020, colour, 1.85:1, 128 mins.

Director: Wei Shujun 魏书钧.

Rating: 3/10.

Pointless indie production that’s as aimless as its central character, a sociopathic sound recordist.

STORY

Beijing the present day. Zuo Kun (Zhang You) lives in a dormitory along with his schoolpal Tong Shaojie (Tong Linkai), and the two live an aimless life attending sound-dubbing classes at a film school – where they make fun of the lecturer, Guo (Zhao Xiaodong) – and working as sound recordists on low-budget projects. Zuo Kun has a fair amount of experience, but Tong Shaojie is useless as his asssistant. They are currently working on the graduation film of Zuo Kun’s pretentious friend Ming (Wang Xiaomu), which stars actress Yi Lin (Zhao Duona) as a young Mongolian woman who comes to Beijing; most of the decisions on the film are actually taken by its arrogant and more experienced director of photography, Zhao Feng (Liu Yuting). Zuo Kun’s girlfriend Zhi (Guan Yingchen) has a degree in Chinese Literature but is working as a marketing model and saving up to take her father to Disneyland in Hong Kong. Zuo Kun is taken off the film after he has an argument with Zhao Feng, though Ming gives him the card of a contact who could give him a job. Zuo Kun gets a job working for Hai (Yan Xiao), a Mongolian building contractor with dreams of being a rock singer, but soon finds out that no one is interested in Hai’s CDs. Despite his aimless approach to life, and habit of picking fights with people, Zuo Kun is actually from a solid middle-class family: his father (Chang Tai) is a policeman and his mother (Li Xiang) a teacher. To raise money to repair the Jeep Cherokee that he bought from a shady second-hand dealer (Liu Yang), Zuo Kun sells the answers to a forthcoming mock exam that he’s stolen from his mother after overhearing her passing them on to a student. Zhi tells him that she’s saved enough for the Hong Kong trip and invites him along, as her father is not going with her. But Zuo Kun is not keen to go and, soon after being booked by the police for driving under the influence, he breaks up with Zhi. During postproduction on the film, Ming decides they need to return to Inner Mongolia for a day’s re-shooting, so the whole crew is re-assembled. Zuo Kun drives Ming, Yi Lin and Tong Shaojie in his rickety car, but then accidentally crashes it halfway while trying to avoid some traffic police.

REVIEW

The third feature-length film by Beijing-born indie film-maker Wei Shujun 魏书钧, 30, followed his gay-flecked road movie Duck Neck 浮世千 (2016) and online camp comedy 卷帘君下凡那些羞羞事儿 (2017), is a pointless two hours spent in the company of uninteresting people and lots of unresolved plotting. A partly autobiographical drama, centred on an aimless sound recordist at film school who just can’t stop being wilfully antagonistic to everyone, Striding into the Wind 野马分鬃 could easily lose at least half an hour, though that would only make it shorter, not better. Finally released in the Mainland a year after playing various festivals, it surprisingly took almost RMB12 million, a respectable amount for such specialised fare.

Wei’s script, co-written with writer-director Gao Linyang 高临阳 (Love Again 再团圆, 2021) who also helped to write Wei’s 15-minute short On the Border 延边少年 (2018), is a shapeless, meandering construction in which scenes play out well beyond their point, potential story strands are left unpursued or unresolved, and by the end nothing at all has changed in the main character’s makeup. It’s never explained why Zuo Kun, played with sulky, suppressed aggression by 30-year-old Zhou You 周游 (the squad junior in oddball comedy Lobster Cop 龙虾刑警, 2018), puts up with his useless school pal, or how his seemingly solid middle-class parents (father a policeman, mother a teacher) produced such a sociopath. (A scene at the end where the father apologises for his son’s upbringing is laughable.) The film seemingly sends up pretentious student film-making but falls into that genre itself. More importantly, it never gives the slightest reason to spend over two hours in the company of such an unsympathetic character. As a kind-of girlfriend who eventually has enough of him, Guan Yingchen 关英辰, 26, acts with some authority in her first film role, though their relationship is never convincingly drawn by the script.

Surprisingly, Kong Jinlei 孔劲蕾, an experienced cutter used to handling indie films, is credited as editor. The film’s Chinese title refers to the mane of a wild horse. Striding was invited into the Official Selection (section not specified) of the 2020 Cannes festival, a theoretical event which did not actually take place because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Its world premiere was, therefore, at the Athens festival later that year. Wei’s subsequent feature, Ripples of Life 永安镇故事集, also centred on a group of film-makers, premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section of the 2021 Cannes festival.

CREDITS

Presented by Alibaba Pictures (Beijing) (CN). Produced by Canno Studio (CN).

Script: Wei Shujun, Gao Linyang. Photography: Wang Jiehong. Editing: Kong Jinlei. Music: Emanuele Arnone. Music supervision: Hou Mengting. Art direction: Liu Zheng. Styling: Su Chao. Sound: Ren Yongsheng, He Wei, Hao Gang. Executive direction: Li Xingbo.

Cast: Zhou You (Zuo Kun), Guan Yingchen (Zhi), Wang Xiaomu (Ming, director), Tong Linkai (Tong Shaojie/Tongtong), Zhao Duona (Yi Lin, actress), Liu Yuting (Zhao Feng, director of photography), Li Meng (Yezi), Wang Ruiqi (driving instructor), Liu Yang (second-hand car dealer), Ma Xu (customer), Zhao Xiaodong (Guo, sound-dubbing teacher), Zhang Xiao (car mechanic), Lin Wenbo (Zhi’s father), Yan Xiao (Hai), Chang Tai (Zuo Kun’s father), Li Xiang (Zuo Kun’s mother), Chen Bohan (student buying test-paper results), Wei Shujun, Wang Jiehong (traffic police), Tan Sen (substitute driver), Du Xian (TV reporter), Maizi (Mongolian resort boss), Baodi (Mongolian village chief), Cui Ya’nan, Kong Jinhai (grasslands traffic police), Ma Zenglin (Ma, detainee-centre director).

Premiere: Athens Film Festival (International Competition), 1 Oct 2020.

Release: China, 26 Nov 2021.