In the last twenty years the cinemas of the East have developed an incredibly sophisticated and diverse body of work, and have been garnering increasing attention in the West, not just at Film Festivals but on the shelves of high street shops. From the charm of the 1980s Hong Kong action flick, through the artistry of China's Fifth Generation and the Tawainese new wave, to the dynamism of the New Korean Cinema; Asian cinema has reinvented film language as we know it, wresting an essentially western medium from its roots and inflecting it with specifically Oriental themes and forms. Often innovative and formally beautiful, Asian film has reinvigorated cinema and began to challenge the dominance of an increasingly stagnant Hollywood. Hollywood's only defence has been to remake Asian films badly. This Blog will provide a personal commentary on the Asian film renaissance.

Thursday, 15 March 2007

Cinema China Day 7 - Raise the Red Lantern and Wedding Banquet

Professor John Orr gave a brilliantly insightful discussion of Hou Hsiao-hsein's film aesthetics today in the posh Elder room of the university's Old College. There i met Pin Lu, the founder and manager of the Chinese Internet Movie Database. I discussed with him the rough idea i have of developing a website on Chinese cinema modelled on Midnight Eye, providing a growing database of reviews, interviews and commentary, which would serve to further develop an audience for Chinese cinema. Considering how exciting the films coming out of China have been of recent years, this strikes me as a vital project that is yet to be seriously taken up.

later in the day I saw Raise the Red Lantern (my second favourite film of all time after In the Mood for Love) on a fantastic print. I could spill rivers of ink enthusing on this film but i will save it for the book i would like to write on Zhang Yimou and just say for now that no film has such a rigorous, architectural control of film form, except perhaps those of Ozu. The visual system of symmetrical, repeated compositions and colour motifs create a sense of entrapment that perfectly reflects Songlian's imprisonment within the patriarchal household. Like the house, the images form a beautiful prison, in which all dissent is turned inwards into petty power struggles between the fourMistresses, whilst the faceless master lingers in the shadows like some terrifying Corleone pulling the strings.
I also saw Ang Lee's the Wedding Banquet, a charming comedy about Wei-Tung and his American gay lover Simon in Manhattan, who attempts to hide his relationship from his visiting Taiwanese parents by holding a fake marriage with his tenant, a struggling artist named Wei-Wei in need of a green card and emotional sustenance. A very funny and uncliched treatment of the material, which completely avoids sentimentality or sensationalism. Expectations of the viewers and parents alike are undermined as the film joyously mocks every 'serious' issue from immigration to heterosexual union, ending in the formation of a very unconventional, though undoubtedly happy, family unit. Few directors have looked at the issue of family recently with as much originality and compassion as Ang Lee.
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