A Road to Spring
通往春天的列车
China, 2019, colour, 2.35:1, 97 mins.
Director: Li Ji 李骥.
Rating: 7/10.
Impressive debut feature, set in a depressed northeastern city, has an involving storyline and black humour.
STORY
Qiqihar city, Heilongjiang province, northeast China, sometime prior to 2017, winter. Due to the decrease in the number of trains, Qihe Train Parts Factory has laid off most of its workforce; now it has only two crews, compared with 40 previously. Engineer Li Daquan (Li Mincheng) is told he’ll be laid off next month and will get a RMB40,000 redundancy package. He tells his wife, Su Fang (Ren Suxi), that evening; she’s philosophical about the news, despite being three months pregnant. That night Li Daquan can’t sleep, and Su Fang won’t have sex with him, so he gets up and goes back to the factory, where he’s accidentally left his mobile phone in his locker. As he leaves for home, he comes across two burglars and tries to catch them by waiting outside the wall where they’ve thrown the stolen goods; but after a scuffle the burglars escape and he ends up being arrested by the factory’s security guards (Zhang Liang, Chen Yuxing). Because he can’t prove he wasn’t stealing the spare parts himself, he’s sacked, and loses the redundancy package. Su Fang drags him along to the home of the factory head (Qin Ling) to ask for the latter’s understanding; the head agrees to give him the redundancy package if he can catch the thieves himself. So every night he sits by the factory wall, hoping they’ll return. Meanwhile, his best friend, He Datong (He Weiran), who was laid off a while ago, invites him to come in on a money-making business with a friend, Wang Quan’er, elsewhere in the province. Li Daquan puts him off for the time being. At a birthday dinner for his elderly father-in-law (Wang Shanxiang) Li Daquan pretends all is well and turns down the father-in-law’s offer of financial help. While setting up a small stall to sell things, Li Daquan sees the same tricycle as the burglars’ drive by but is unable to chase it. When He Datong and his wife, Jiahui (Yang Junhan), come round for dinner, He Datong says he’ll leave after Chinese New Year to go into business with Wang Quan’er; but Li Daquan reiterates he really wants to catch the thieves. Pretending to be handicapped, he buys a three-wheel taxi from an old woman (Ma Lanying) and goes into the business. While fixing his radiator at a cut-price junk shop, he notices one of his factory’s spare parts on the ground. The clue eventually leads him to the burglars; but bringing the guilty parties to justice is another matter.
REVIEW
A potentially interesting new talent is revealed in A Road to Spring 通往春天的列车, the first feature of Li Ji 李骥, a writer-director in his late 30s, following his 2015 short A Woman Named Hong Ying 红英. What could have been just another dreary drama set in a wintry, depressed industrial town becomes a pointed, acutely observed black comedy, thanks to Li’s script and his small band of leads, led by practised comedienne Ren Suxi 任素汐. Released in the Mainland almost a year after its festival debut abroad, the film scored RMB3.2 million, a token amount but fair enough in the circumstances.
Like his short, Road was shot in Li’s hometown Qiqihar, a city in Heilongjiang province, northeast China, that’s known as a manufacturing base and not much else. Set a few years ago (sometime prior to the government’s recent economic stimulation), the plot centres on a worker who’s laid off from a train-parts factory and, after being accused of stealing from his former workplace one night, has his redundancy package cancelled. The only way he can get it back is to prove his innocence by tracking down the burglars himself. Though it does a couple of unexpected twists of its own, the finding of the real thieves is largely a MacGuffin onto which to hang the story of a young couple making a go of it in an economically depressed (unnamed) town with a baby on the way.
The film’s Chinese title (literally, “A Train Leading to Spring”) has echoes of that for the 2002 relationships drama Spring Subway 开往春天的地铁 (“A Metro Bound for Spring”), directed by Zhang Yibai 张一白 and written by the then-hip Liu Fendou 刘奋斗. There’s a glancing similarity between the two plots – with the husband losing his job at the start – but where Spring Subway is a self-consciously smart Beijing movie that plays with time and conventions, A Road to Spring is a much more literal one set in the scungy, industrial Northeast, where not only is the central couple literally as well as figuratively trying to get through the winter to reach spring but also the husband actually takes a train (with his best friend) to find lucrative work outside their hometown.
Impressively, Li gets the balance just right between realistic observation and black humour, between the kind of fatalism in which the couple are forced to accept the crafty factory head’s deal to find the thieves themselves and the humour (expressed in colourful northeastern accents) that gets them through an intensely depressing situation. Li and his d.p. Zhang Yu 张寓 paint a believable portrait of an unpretty industrial town in winter, catching the cold grey light of the Northeast (with especially clear night photography) while letting the warmer personalities shine through in home interiors. Chief among these is the lantern-faced Ren, 32, a theatre-trained actress who’s never given a bad performance in her life and whose gift for straightfaced comedy is her greatest asset (Mr. Donkey 驴得水, 2016; Almost a Comedy 半个喜剧, 2019). As the pregnant but philosophical wife, she’s the rock behind the central relationship, and extracts good natural chemistry from Li Mincheng 李岷城, 33, as the husband determined to prove his innocence. Not especially noted for his expressiveness (Crossing the Border 非常之恋, 2012; Song of the Phoenix 百鸟朝凤, 2013), Li registers okay here, especially in scenes with He Weiran 何巍然 as his more extrovert best pal.
Supporting roles are all well etched, especially Wang Shanxiang 王善祥 as the wife’s sickly but observant father. The subject of Li’s short, the handicapped three-wheel-taxi driver Hongying, briefly reappears here, also played by Ma Lanying 马兰英.
CREDITS
Presented by Heaven Pictures (Beijing) The Movie (CN), Gather In The Sky Film & TV Media (CN), Beijing Feels Fine Culture Media (CN), Beijing New United Film (CN), Beijing Linking Star Pictures (CN), Shenzhen Dongyi Tourism Investment (CN).
Script: Li Ji. Photography: Zhang Yu. Editing: Li Ji, Wang Changrui, Du Yu. Music: Chong Shan, Shen Li. Music supervision: Huang Yong. Music production: Wu Tingting. Art direction: Jiang Nan. Action: Wang Deming. Sound: Liu Tong, Liu Zizheng.
Cast: Li Mincheng (Li Daquan), Ren Suxi (Su Fang), He Weiran (He Datong), Yang Junhan (Jiahui, He Datong’s wife), Zhang Liang (Wang Qiang, security guard at factory), Chen Yuxing (Wang Jian, security guard at factory), Li Yilong (Dong Sheng, burglar), Li Huaiwei (Qi Yan, burglar), Wang Shanxiang (Su Fang’s father), Feng Huijun (Su Fang’s mother), Wang Xin (Su Jiaqing, Su Fang’s younger brother), Li Peng (junk owner), Ma Lanying (Hongying, three-wheel taxi owner), Qin Ling (factory head).
Premiere: Busan Film Festival (New Currents), 5 Oct 2019.
Release: China, 17 Sep 2020.