Stand Up

站起来

China, 2009, colour, 16:9, 99 mins.

Director: Minhui 敏卉 [Xing Minhui 邢敏卉].

Rating: 6/10.

Feel-good, true tale of a crippled worker’s struggle for compensation avoids wallowing in sentiment.

STORY

Jilin city, northeast China, 1994. Song Xuewen (Song Xuewen), 25, lives at home with his parents (Du Xiaoguang, Gao Xiufeng). (Two years earlier, while working for the chemical construction company Huarui, he had by chance picked up a small chain he’d seen in the snow and kept it in his pocket for 10 hours. It had actually fallen out of an instrument used to measure industrial radiation. Over the following two years he had seven operations, amputating both his legs below the hips and half his left arm, as well as losing control of the fingers on his right hand. He became so addicted to morphine as a painkiller that he had to have three drug rehabilitations.) Now recovered, but dependent on his parents for all his needs, Song Xuewen is ashamed to leave the flat in a wheelchair, unless he covers his face with an umbrella. He goes for a fitting for false limbs but the cost is prohibitive; his mother angrily demands compensation from Huarui’s works manager Wang (Li Da) but to no avail. Feeling lonely one evening, Song Xuewen calls a radio station to request some music, pretending it’s his birthday. By mistake he calls a local kindergarten, where teacher Yang Guang (Wang Wei) is on duty. They start chatting; she’s the same age as him. Later, he confesses he’s a cripple, but she still visits him at home; she continues to, despite the advances of a a young man, Han Liang (Yao Jinfei), from her hometown. Yang Guang buys Song Xuewen some mannequin legs to wear when he goes outside in his wheelchair, but he angrily refuses them. His mother buys rail tickets for Beijing, to confront the company’s head office; but when she’s laid up in bed by a fall on the stairs, Yang Guang takes her place, cancelling her own trip back home during the school holidays. The pair find a cheap room in a courtyard house but in the big city of Beijing they’re shunted around from office to office by the company’s management and are almost scammed at one point by some street criminals. Against all the odds they decide to stay on, but gradually their money runs out.

REVIEW

Crippled by accidental exposure to radiation, a young worker fights to get compensation in Stand Up 站起来, a feel-good tale based on a true story that avoids wallowing in sentiment. Made well over a decade ago but showing no signs of age, it marked the writing/directing debut of Shanghai-born Xing Minhui 刑敏卉 (using just her given name Minhui 敏卉). Certified in 2008, and premiered the following year at a US festival, it was finally released in the Mainland in 2011 but made zero commercial impact (RMB109,000). It was to be 10 years before Xing’s second feature appeared, the very fine City in the Air 空中之城 (2021).

Xing initially trained as a ballet dancer before working abroad as a TV presenter – first in Singapore (for Mediacorp, from 1994) and then in New York (for Sinovision, from 1998), going on to study film-making in the latter city from 2005. The film gains immeasurably in dramatic cred not only from Xing’s consistently low-key treatment of the material – drawn from the 2004 autobiography, The Chain of Life and Death 生死链, by Song Xuewen 宋学文 – but also from Song playing himself, in a performance that integrates seamlessly with the rest of the cast, and especially from actress Wang Wei 王蔚 as the young woman who sticks by his side.

After unemotionally sketching the accident itself and Song’s traumatic first two years (both legs and half an arm amputated, plus repeated morphine dependency), the script picks up when he’s recovered but is wary of leaving home, where his parents cater for all his needs. A chance misdial on the phone puts him in touch with a kindergarten teacher (Wang), who gradually gets to know him and throws in her lot with his when he decides to confront the head office in Beijing to pay for some prosthetic limbs so he can finally “stand up” again. Against the odds, Xing’s script and sensitive direction manage the difficult task of making the pair’s relationship believable despite Song’s physical afflictions, even when a good-looking childhood friend from the girl’s home village is making his intentions clear. That hurdle overcome, the main part of the film becomes a story of a young couple in the Big City, where the locals are rude, the bureaucrats stonewall, and street scammers are ready to take your last yuan.

It could all have been just another grim, depressing saga of two outsiders battling the system. But as the two out-of-towners negotiate the vast concrete sprawl of the capital, Xing makes the story digestible by focusing on the performances and using some discreet technical packaging. After a slow start, Song reveals a charming, upbeat side to his personality that makes the girl’s liking for him believable, while TV actress Wang, in a rare film appearance, motors the personal drama with upbeat but not over-jolly playing. Supports are all well etched, without any easy exaggeration.

The well-composed, warmish photography by Gan Lu 甘露, known for her making-of documentaries for directors like Zhang Yimou 张艺谋 and Xu Ke 徐克 [Tsui Hark], manages to make both the smokestacks of northeast China and the concrete vistas of summertime Beijing acceptable rather than purely alienating. Where Xing shows her inexperience is in the lack of pacing or overall architecture, though her habit of quietly fading out on scenes helps to push the narrative along and predicts her more sophisticated use of ellipses in City in the Air. Editing by the experienced Zhang Yifan 张一凡, who’d already cut films like Devils on the Doorstep 鬼子来了 (2000), The Missing Gun 寻枪 (2002), Green Tea 绿茶 (2003) and The Longest Night in Shanghai 夜。上海 (2007), is on the nose throughout.

CREDITS

Presented by China Film Group Beijing Film Studio (CN), Shanghai Power Point Studio (CN). Produced by China Film Group Beijing Film Studio (CN), Shanghai Power Point Studio (CN).

Script: Minhui [Xing Minhui]. Photography: Gan Lu. Editing: Zhang Yifan. Music: Huang Ruo. Art direction: Chen Gang. Costumes: Jin Yi. Sound: Liu Lei.

Cast: Song Xuewen (himself), Wang Wei (Yang Guang), Du Xiaoguang (Song Xuewen’s father), Gao Xiufeng (Song Xuewen’s mother), Yao Jinfei (Han Liang), Ji Qin (landlady in Beijing), Yang Chuanxi (Sun), Zhong Weirong (Shan, street lawyer), Zhu Zhiguang (sock seller), Li Da (Wang, works manager in Jilin), Li Zheng (Ma, section head), Wei Guo (Lin, company secretary), Cui Yingjie (scrap dealer), Wei Ating (man in toilet), Chen Hongan (Chen, lawyer), Peng Tao (bicycle man), Yu Xiao (jewellery shop assistant), Li Jingping (personnel manager in Beijing), Wu Zhen (student), Jiang (forager), Wu Dai (blind man).

Premiere: Atlanta Film Festival (Narrative Features), US, Apr 2009.

Release: China, 11 Mar 2011.