Red Amnesia

闯入者

China, 2014, colour, 1.85:1, 116 mins. (premiere version), 104 mins. (release version).

Director: Wang Xiaoshuai 王小帅.

Rating: 7/10.

Veteran actress Lv Zhong powers an uneven mystery-drama on long-buried guilt and denial.

STORY

Beijing, the present day, summer. Following the death of her husband (Xu Shouqin), Deng Meijuan (Lv Zhong) stubbornly lives alone in a block of flats rather than with her elder son Zhang Jun (Feng Yuanzheng), his wife Wang Lu (Qin Hailu) and their young son Xiaobao (Zhao Zelong). To the annoyance of Wang Lu, she regularly visits their flat to cook meals and also insists on helping to pick up Xiaobao from school. She does the same with her younger son Zhang Bing (Qin Hao) and makes no secret of her disapproval of him living together with his boyfriend (Han Yibo). Deng Meijuan has started being troubled by repeated phone calls from a silent stranger. The police think she’s imagining them but eventually Zhang Jun gets a friend to install a new phone with a monitoring device. One day, after drawing RMB7,000 from the bank to reserve her elderly mother (Huang Suying) a place in a hospice, she sees a teenage boy (Shi Liu) following her in the street. That night a stone is thrown through her window. Her sons originally think the caller may be Fat Liu, because of some business dealing with Zhang Jun, but the phone records don’t support this theory. One evening Deng Meijuan guesses the caller is Zhao, whom she once knew long ago, and she apologises over the phone to him and his family, especially his wife Xiufeng. The next day she sees the teenager again and, after he helps with an errand, she invite him back to her flat for a meal and lets him sleep over. In the morning she finds her family photos have been vandalised, and tells her sons that the boy is the ghost of Zhao, who died a month ago, and has come to collect the “debt” she owes him. Finally, however, she identifies the teenager from some CCTV photos, and the police say he’s wanted for a series of break-ins and the murder of an old man. Zhang Jun then tells his younger brother about a piece of family history from the days of the Cultural Revolution, and Deng Meijuan decides to travel south to Guizhou province to finally lay some ghosts to rest.

REVIEW

Three years after 11 Flowers 我11 (2011), his involving snapshot of childhood during the dying days of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), writer-director Wang Xiaoshuai 王小帅 completes his loose trilogy on families affected by the so-called Third Front movement of the period. Carried by an oustanding performance from Beijing People’s Art Theatre 北京人民艺术剧院 actress Lv Zhong 吕中, 73 – recently seen in a small role as a professor in The Great Hypnotist 催眠大师 (2014) – Red Amnesia 闯入者 is an ambitious dissection of guilt and memory that takes too long to get to the heart of the matter but still manages to pack a considerable punch in its final half-hour. Lv’s playing alone earns the movie an extra point.

Wang’s recurrent problem in marrying content with form and technique has often resulted in movies that run between 115-120 minutes but would benefit by being 15-20 minutes shorter. The exception was 11 Flowers – his best film since Beijing Bicycle 十七岁的单车 (2000) – thanks to a richly crafted screenplay full of involving characters that had a clear dramatic line and fine mounting by d.p. Dong Jinsong 董劲松 (People Mountain People Sea 人山人海, 2011) and production/costume designer Lv Dong 吕东 that complemented the period setting. For Amnesia, Wang has returned to his regular d.p. Wu Di 邬迪, whose less textured style could be said to be a better fit for a story set in the present but which brings little extra resonance to a story that’s initially franmed as a kind of mystery-drama.

Mainland cinema is hardly short on movies dealing with the emotional scars of the Cultural Revolution. But unlike the two previous legs of Wang’s trilogy (Shanghai Dreams 青红, 2005; 11 Flowers), Amnesia is set wholly in the present, showing the effects of lingering guilt from 40-or-so years earlier. So, no Red Guards waving Little Red Books, no slogans broadcast through loudspeakers, and no oppressed intellectuals “sent down” to the countryside. Instead, the whole era is summed up in Lv’s still strikingly beautiful face, her “old-fashioned” ideas (as perceived by a younger generation) and occasional songs from the period sung by Beijing oldsters.

The hook to the drama is a series of anonymous phone calls received by Lv’s widow following the death of a man she knew many years ago. The police initially think she’s imagining things, though her two sons eventually start to take the calls seriously; meanwhile, she has conversations with the ghost of her late husband and finds herself followed around by a mysterious, silent teenager who may or may not be linked with a series of break-ins. (The Chinese title literally means “The Intruder”.) It’s an intriguing approach that works well initially, with some mild suspense; but there’s a growing loss of tension and direction as the script keeps on veering off here and there. The widow’s younger son is shown to be gay, to no apparent point; she’s also caring for her elderly mother in a hospice, again to no apparent point; her meetings with a mysterious teenage boy are stretched beyond their dramatic usefulness; and so on.

At the 90-minute mark – half-an-hour beyond the point where the plot should be cohering – Wang finally shifts it in a decisive direction, with the revelation of some family background and a shift in locale down south to Guizhou province. The final section is undeniably powerful and it’s a tribute to both Lv and Wang that they manage to carry the audience along after the earlier discursiveness. But more ruthless re-editing of the first hour would make Amnesia a much stronger movie.

As the stubborn old widow who won’t take no for an answer – a kind of female version of the main character in Wang’s Chongqing Blues 日照重庆(2010) – Lv gives the type of award-winning performance that throws everyone else into the shade, including a fine actress like Qin Hailu 秦海璐 (here in a smallish role as the frustrated daughter-in-law), plus Qin Hao 秦昊 (Mystery 浮城谜事, 2012; Blind Massage 推拿, 2014) as her gay younger son and theatre-TV actor Feng Yuanzheng 冯远征 (the itinerant physician in costume drama Fall of Ming 大明劫, 2013) as her older married one.

Though not referred to by name here, the Third Front 三线建设 was a movement begun in the mid-1960s to relocate important industries inland from potential attack by the Soviet Union. The displacement of families from major cities like Beijing and Shanghai caused scars that still linger for that generation, despite its collective amnesia referred to in the film’s English title.

*

The director’s revised cut of the film, running 104 minutes, premiered in Berlin’s European Film Market on 9 Feb 2015. This version officially replaced the one premiered at the Venice Film Festival five months earlier, and is also the version distributed in China. The 12 minutes of cuts are all in the Beijing section of the film and, apart from the wise removal of a violent argument between two tenants in Deng Meijuan’s block, are mostly unnoticeable trims; some scenes have also been re-arranged. The result is a much smoother, more logical film that gets to the point earlier.

CREDITS

Presented by Dongchun Films (CN), Inlook Media Group (CN), Herun Media (CN), Edko (Beijing) Films (CN), Gravity Pictures Film Production (CN), Chongqing Film Group (CN). Produced by WXS Production (CN).

Script: Wang Xiaoshuai, Fang Lei, Li Fei. Photography: Wu Di. Editing: Yang Hongyu. Music: Umeit. Art direction: Lou Pan. Sound: Fu Kang, Huang Zheng. Action: Fu Bin. Visual effects: Wu Wen (www.123vfx.com).

Cast: Lv Zhong (Deng Meijuan), Feng Yuanzheng (Zhang Jun, her elder son), Qin Hailu (Wang Lu, her daughter-in-law), Qin Hao (Zhang Bing, her younger son), Shi Liu (the boy), Huang Suying (Deng Meijuan’s mother), Han Yibo (Zhang Bing’s boyfriend), Xu Shouqin (Deng Meijun’s husband), Zhao Zelong (Xiaobao), Li Ranran (Xiufeng, Zhao’s wife), Wu Bing (phone technician), Ju Hongyu (Li), Chuo Ni (Li’s wife), Jing Limin (Huang), Li Xiaoxi (Huang’s wife), Zhang Haibing (Huang’s son), Yao Yilian (nurse), Wang Kuang (shop manager), Xu Ziqian (accountant), Zhang Songwen, Cao Weiyu (policemen).

Premiere: Venice Film Festival (Competition), 4 Sep 2014.

Release: China, 30 Apr 2015.

(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 8 Sep 2014, and revised in Mar 2015.)