The Composer

音乐家

China/Kazakhstan, 2019, colour, 2.35:1, 103 mins.

Director: Xirzat Yahup 西尔扎提·亚合甫.

Rating: 5/10.

A respectable but bloodless biopic centred on the final, wartime years of composer Xian Xinghai.

STORY

Alma-Ata [modern-day Alamaty], Kazakhstan, 1991, winter. Xian Ni’na (Jue Xue) visits Kalamkas (Altnay Nogerbek) for the first time and is taken to the latter’s house. Kalamkas remembers the first time when, as a young child, she met Xian Ni’na’s late father, the composer/violinist Xian Xinghai (Hu Jun), whom she knew by the Kazakh nickname Koke. Moscow, 1941: the country is at war with Germany and Xian Xinghai is there to complete work on a Chinese war documentary. In late 1941, when the city is under attack, Xian Xinghai is forced to evacuate, initially taking a train to Alma-Ata to try to get back home. He finds himself stranded there in the depths of winter, with only a basic knowledge of Russian, and joins other refugee musicians looking for work. By chance, when a player in the city’s orchestra enlists in the army, he’s offered a place as a back-desk violinist by the musical director, composer/conductor Bakhytzhan Bakadamov (Berik Aitzhanov). Xian Xinghai is upset to hear the film he was working on has been destroyed by bombing on its way to Alma-Ata. (He remembers saying goodbye to his wife Qian Yunling [Yuan Quan] and young daughter Xian Ni’na [Ling Guo] in Yan’an.) Bakhytzhan Bakadamov houses Xian Xinghai at the home of his recently widowed younger sister, Danash (Aruzhan Jazilbekova), who has a daughter, Kalamkas (Dilnaz Nurseit), aged six, who thinks her father is still alive at the front. Recognising Xian Xinghai’s talent, Bakhytzhan Bakadamov also gives him some arranging work. When Danash is injured at the factory where she works, Xian Xinghai takes her place, and he and she gradually bond. In spring 1943, she and Kalamkas are upset when he decides to leave, hoping to cross the border at Bakhty into China. But his papers have expired, and the area across the border is controlled by a warlord, so the Kazakh authorities prevent him from crossing, for his own good. Back in Alma-Ata, Danash confides that her husband was actually executed as “an enemy of the people” and Kalamkas is not to know. Despite deaths, the orchestra manages to keep going as part of the war effort, and Xian Xinghai’s arrangements of folk melodies prove popular, including a composition lauding Kazakh national hero Amangeldy that is sung in public after the Soviet victory over the Germans at the battle of Kursk in summer 1943. In autumn 1944 the orchestra is finally shut down as players are assigned to various regions. Xian Xinghai is sent to teach music in Makanchi village, right next to the Chinese border, but he finds it not so easy to make the short journey into his native country.

REVIEW

The first fruit of a 2017 co-production treaty between China and Kazakhstan, as part of the Belt & Road Initiative, The Composer 音乐家 is a by-the-numbers biopic that’s good on the small realities of life behind the front line during WW2 but is otherwise a respectable, bloodless affair that never touches the emotions as it should. The subject is Mainland composer Xian Xinghai 冼星海 (1905-45) – best known for his Yellow River Cantata 黄河大合唱 (1939) – and the final four years of his life as he tried to get back from the Soviet Union (mostly Kazakhstan) to China. Led by a dull performance from experienced actor Hu Jun 胡军, 52, it derives most of its limited warmth from the Kazakh characters who look after him as he pines to get across the border. At RMB5 million, local box office was miniscule.

Though the film’s over-riding theme is the composer’s desire to return to China, Xian Xinghai was actually born in Macau and from the age of six was raised in Singapore until his mid-teens; although he spent short periods studing music in the Mainland, he then spent six years in Paris from his mid-20s before making China his full-time home from 1935. His Singapore childhood was already filmed as The Star and the Sea 星海 (2011, dirs. Li Qiankuan 李前宽, Xiao Guiyun 肖桂云, see poster, left) and the decade from his Paris studies to his departure to the Soviet Union was dealt with in the Pearl River Studio production Xian Xinghai 冼星海 (1994, Wang Hengli 王亨里, see left, below), so in the greater scheme of things The Composer does fill in a part of his life that so far hasn’t been filmed – as well as neatly fulfilling the demands of a Kazakh co-production. But there’s still a feeling throughout the movie – heightened by brief flashbacks to his wife and child in Yan’an – that there’s a bigger, more interesting story around the composer that is being shut out. (For those who didn’t know already, his varied life is revealed only at the end of the film in captions.)

Xinjiang-based Uyghur director Xirzat Yahup 西尔扎提·亚合甫, who’s co-directed the above-average co-production Meet in Pyongyang 平壤之约 (2012), as well as other ethnic dramas (Genuine Love 真爱, 2014), has put together a good-looking production, with muted widescreen photography by Lu Hongyi 卢宏义 (in China, Kazakhstan and Russia) and a surprisingly understated, mostly lyrical score by South Korea’s Yi Dong-jun 이동준 | 李东峻 (The Heart 冠军的心; The Rookies 素人特工; Shanghai Fortress 上海堡垒, all 2019), that moves smoothly but seems unable to draw much human drama from its short time-frame. Hu’s blank performance doesn’t help, and fellow Mainlander Yuan Quan 袁泉 only occasionally pops up in sweet flashbacks as his wife, so most of the film is carried by Kazakh actress Aruzhan Jazilbekova, 34, and youngster Dilnaz Nurseit as the widow and her daughter with whom he lodges in a warm but platonic relationship that the writers also don’t flesh out into anything very affecting. For all its old-style, nationalistic hagiography, Xian Xinghai had more passion than is on show in The Composer.

CREDITS

Presented by Beijing Shinework Pictures (CN), Kazakfilm (KZ). Produced by Beijing Shinework Pictures (CN), Kazakfilm (KZ).

Script: Zhang Suisui, Hayixia Tabareke. Photography: Lu Hongyi. Editing: Zhu Lin, Gao Xiujuan, Wei Yong. Music: Yi Dong-jun. Art direction: Lu Yuelin. Costume design: Cao Yangui, Azhar Aubakimova. Styling: Wang Yuling. Sound: Li Ke, Zhang Lei, Zhao Kun. Artistic direction: Sabit Kurmanbekov. Artistic advice: Mei Feng, Xue Xiaolu.

Cast: Hu Jun (Xian Xinghai/Huang Xun/Koke), Yuan Quan (Qian Yunling), Berik Aitzhanov (Bakhytzhan Bakadamov), Aruzhan Jazilbekova (Danash), Ju Xue (adult Xian Ni’na), Dilnaz Nurseit (young Kalamkas), Ling Guo (young Xian Ni’na), Altnay Nogerbek (adult Kalamkas), Yerlan Karibayev (Zhubanov), Timur Bondank (Hamydy), Yuri Gnusarev (Aleksandrov), Gainkamal Baigushkarova (Bakhytzhan Bakadamov’s mother), Anastasia Temkina (Sofia Ivanova), Yerbolat Toguzakov (Karim, theatre doorkeeper).

Premiere: Beijing Film Festival (Opening Film; Competition), 13 Apr 2019.

Release: China, 17 May 2019; Kazakhstan, tba.