The Poet
诗人
China, 2018, colour, 2.35:1, 121 mins.
Director: Liu Hao 刘浩.
Rating: 7/10.
Impressive fifth feature by indie filmmaker Liu Hao is an elegy for simpler times that’s lit up by its two leads, especially actress Song Jia.
STORY
Hejiashan Coal Mine, a remote area of northwest China, the early 1980s. Husband and wife Li Wu (Zhu Yawen) and Chen Hui (Song Jia) live and work in small, remote community around the mine; he works as a mining labourer above ground and she works in a printing and dyeing workshop. In his spare time Li Wu is studying to get a diploma so he can escape mining and become a cadre in an office; but his real interest is writing poetry. Chen Hui is happy to devote herself to his dreams, always turning down invitations to go out dancing by her younger workmate Li Li (Zhang Yao). One day one of Li Wu’s poems is published in Poetry Periodical 诗刊 and he receives a fee of RMB3, making him a local hero whose success reflects on the whole mine. The mining company’s head (Zhang Jianguo) suggests Li Wu helps out the publicity department’s head, Liu Jianguo (Han Jin), so Li Wu gets a provisional transfer to a desk job. Chen Hui, who’s seen as a conscientious worker by her supervisor Sister Hong (Su Yijuan), is offered a chance to study at evening college, paid for by the company; but she turns it down, as Li Wu is soon to take his diploma exam and needs her support. Instead, she recommends Li Li. In the meantime, the mining community is visited by well-known local poet Zhang Mu (Zhou Lijing) who publicly commends Li Wu. After he sits his exam, Li Wu returns elated, and dreams of becoming someone like Zhang Mu. He and Chen Hui make passionate love. After transferring to Liu Jianguo’s office, Li Wu starts working on his poetry until late every night. This affects his office duties and Liu Jianguo is forced to give him a dressing down. All the poetry he sends off to various magazines is returned, though Chen Hui says she still believes in him. To thank Chen Hui for recommending her for the evening classes, Li Li arranges, via one of her ex-boyfriends, Zhang Yi (Zheng Jiabin), for Chen Hui to meet Shen Yanbin (Kang Bo), a man in town who owns a mimeograph machine. Without telling Li Wu, she makes stencils of his poems and has the pages bound into books. Li Wu even suspects she is having an affaire because she is always coming home late. Meanwhile, he is sent back to his mining work unit by Liu Jianguo, exasperated by Li Wu’s lack of time-keeping. After the book of his poetry comes out, Chen Hui is asked by Zhang Mu to hand write some of his unpublished poetry as well, as her calligraphy is so good. Later, Zhang Mu recommends Li Wu takes part in a poetry competition he is involved with. Li Wu wins, and Shen Yanbin accuses Chen Hui of deliberately currying favour (or more) with Zhang Mu to help her husband. Li Wu is once again a local hero. However, his relationship with Zhang Mu, whom he once so admired, turns sour; and as the 1980s wear on, the small Hejiashan community breaks up as economic reforms start to bite, and staff are retired or laid off and people seek better opportunities down in the south. By the early/mid-1990s Li Wu’s onetime team leader and good friend Li Bing (Xu Ning) has a smart office as a manager, and Li Wu himself, now living alone, is chairman of Hejiashan Literary Association in town. It’s a prestigious but meaningless job, as poetry is no longer so coveted in the new economic climate. And then Li Li, who left the dyeing workshop years ago, suddenly contacts him.
REVIEW
After plugging away for two decades in the indie scene, Shanghai-born writer-director Liu Hao 刘浩, now in his early 50s, comes up with his fifth and best feature so far in The Poet 诗人, a beautifully observed meditation on individual obsession, the tolls taken by time, and how much China has lost in its rapid transformation of the past 40 years. None of these themes (and especially the last) is new in Mainland cinema; but by focusing on a tiny, remote community and one man’s esoteric interest, Liu brings a focus to the film that is often lost in more expansive treatments, and is also rewarded by excellent playing by the whole cast. After premiering in autumn 2018 at the Tokyo festival, it was finally released at home in mid-2021, amid a mass of under-performing titles in early summer, taking a microscopic RMB1.2 million. Its downbeat tone, especially in the middle of a pandemic, was hardly likely to appeal, especially to a young audience.
The script was initially completed back in 2005, after Liu’s first two low-budget productions, the offbeat romance Chen Mo and Meiting 陈默和美婷 (2002) and the rural satire Two Great Sheep 好大一对羊 (2004). Instead, Liu went on to make another light satire, Addicted to Love 老那 (2010) and his first out-and-out drama Back to the North 向北方 (2015). Often ironic, his films have always focused on a particular issue without grandstanding it in favour of character observation: the offbeat romance between a flower-seller and a massage girl in his debut feature, agrarian reform from the p.o.v. of crafty peasants in Sheep, the social sidelining of oldies in Addicted, and the downside of the one-child policy in North. A drama rather than a satire, The Poet also centres on societal outsiders: a man in a rough mining community who’d rather write poetry and his wife who’d rather cook meals for him than go out dancing with her workmates. During the period immediately after the Cultural Revolution, when communal values still continue, they manage to survive and even thrive; but later, as economic reform ravages society, they are torn apart by market forces.
Though Liu never makes it 100% clear, the film can be read as an elegy for a simpler time – a nostalgic theme that keeps cropping up in Mainland cinema (witness the gigantic success of comic heartwarmer Hi, Mom 你好，李焕英, 2021) as daily life becomes ever more socially remote. But true to his style, which often leaves things unexplained, Liu doesn’t even specify the exact time and place in which the film unfolds, leaving it to viewers to recognise internal clues and thereby escaping a format that plods from one year to another. (Internal evidence points to it being set in Gansu province, northwest China, from about the early 1980s to the early/mid-1990s. The famous visit to the special economic zone of Shenzhen by Deng Xiaoping that’s reported on the radio about 80 minutes into the film took place in Jan 1992.) But it deals with a period of social and economic transformation that any older audience will immediately recognise.
The film also has, for the first time in Liu’s career, a more “studio” look, with a purpose-built set showing the township around the mine in the middle of nowhere. Within that there functions a typical micro-community: the gatekeeper who knows everyone, the postmistress who handles everyone’s mail, the offices where cadres work, and the grungier rooms where the miners gather and gossip. Working again with his regular d.p. Li Bingqiang 李炳强 (who also shoots regular mainstream productions like But Always 一生一世, 2014; Fleet of Time 勿勿那年, 2014; Hello, Mrs. Money 李茶的“姑妈”, 2018; Be Somebody 扬名立万, 2021), Liu creates a carefully composed world of repetitive work, suppressed sexual desire (exemplified by the wife’s woolly leggings that take on an almost fetishistic role) and small, festering jealousies that only occasionally break the surface of communal values. When they do, the effect is striking: a rant by an ex-boyfriend against the wife’s manipulative workmate, and an explosion of repressed anger by the husband against his onetime literary hero. What makes the titular hero’s life bearable in the 1980s is the unquestioning devotion of his wife, and the moments where he suddenly becomes a local hero after a poem is published. The way in which all that changes – the communal esteem, the devoted love – in the hard-nosed market economy of the 1990s takes up the film’s final 40-or-so minutes.
Though it’s the husband who provides the film’s title, it’s the wife who is really the centre of things, especially as played here by Harbin-born Song Jia 宋佳, then in her late 30s, an often undemonstrative actress who’s gradually risen through the ranks and doesn’t always get the acclaim she deserves (Falling Flowers 萧红, 2012; When Larry Met Mary 陆垚知马俐, 2016; The Shadow Play 风中有朵雨做的云, 2018; Back to the Wharf 风平浪静, 2020). The versatile Zhu Yawen 朱亚文, then in his mid-30s, who’s played everything from crime dramas (The Witness 我是证人, 2015) to comedy (When Larry Met Mary; ATM 逗爱熊仁镇, 2019), is believable as the taciturn, self-absorbed poet but it’s Song who binds the whole film together – and her sudden absence from most of the final 40 minutes is the film’s major structural fault. Good as the supporting performances are – actress-singer Zhang Yao 张瑶 as the wife’s self-serving workmate, Zhou Lijing 周里京 as the esteemed local poet, among several – Song’s absence can’t be replaced, losing the film a point.
Besides Li’s terrific widescreen compositions, especially of the barren northwest landscape, other technical contributions are all strong, especially period design by Li Chuanyong 李传永. Given its even tone throughout, and absence of music until the end titles, The Poet could arguably lose about 15-20 minutes – though it would be hard to say where to make cuts and the film is never a tough sit, thanks to the performances and Liu’s talent for character observation between all the succinct dialogue.
CREDITS
Presented by Zhejiiang Huace Film & TV (CN), Youth Film Studio (CN), Huanxi Media Group (CN), China International Broadcasting Network (Beijing) (CN), 8mm Media (Beijing) (CN), Xinjiang Film Group (CN), Shanghai Heying Film (CN), Yanfan Lianhe International Film & TV Media (Beijing) (CN). Produced by Xinjiang Film Group (CN), Atrio Media (Beijing) (CN).
Script: Liu Hao. Photography: Li Bingqiang. Editing: Li Tianming. Music: Dong Yingda. Art direction: Li Chuanyong. Styling: Wang Shuo. Sound: Fang Tao, Hao Zhiyu, Shen Jianqin. Executive direction: Yang Dong.
Cast: Song Jia (Chen Hui), Zhu Yawen (Li Wu), Zhang Yao (Li Li), Zhou Lijing (Zhang Mu), Zheng Jiabin (Zhang Yi), Su Yijuan (Sister Hong, dyeing workshop head), Xu Ning (Li Bing, Li Wu’s team leader), Xiao Guangya (Xiaoliu), Zhang Bochen (Jiang Hongtao), Li Sheng (Zhang Guohua/Fattie), Song Kebin (Ren Qiang), Han Jin (Liu Jianguo, publicity department head), Kang Bo (Shen Yanbin), Shi Wencheng (Liu Jianshe), Geng Fengliang (Four Eyes), Zhu Weling (Song Qian, postmistress), Huo Guangxi (Yang, gatekeeper), Wang Lixia (Yang’s daughter), Yang Chenlu (Sister Hong’s daughter), Yan Wei (Song Baohua), Zhang Hua (Zhang Mu’s secretary), Zhang Jianguo (Ding Shaojun, mining company head), Chen Wenzhong (Zang, works director).
Premiere: Tokyo Film Festival (Competition), 27 Oct 2018.
Release: China, 5 Jun 2021.