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BLIND SHAFT
Review by Matthew Plouffe
a Film Comment online exclusive
Awarded the Silver Bear at this year's Berlin Film Festival, Li Yang's feature debut Blind Shaft serves up a slice of no-income lifestyle brimming with dreary documentary realism. What results is an illuminating sociopolitical portrait which highlights an unpleasant truth about China's destitute underclass. The subject here is the country's illegal mining companies and the drifters risking their lives to stay afloat in the supposedly-affluent current economic condition. It's not a pretty picture and as perspicacious readers will correctly conclude-despite the accolades-my mention of that "unpleasant truth" about a "destitute underclass" carries unfortunate and familiar subtext: Blind Shaft is another Chinese film that will not be shown in its own image-conscious country.
Censor griping aside, it should be reiterated that today's Chinese cinema is fascinating to follow if only to see where new films will fall in the widening "Generation" gap. A slow transition to Sixth Generation dominance on the international festival circuit continues to yield the occasional praiseworthy newcomer for every directorial wunderkind like Jia Zhangke (Unknown Pleasures). And with the stench of cheese-stuffed crowd pleasers like Chen Kaige's deplorable Together currently emanating from the remains of Fifth generation all-star oeuvres, audiences and filmmakers alike have reason to pray for directors willing to sacrifice Chinese screen-time for uncompromised integrity. At 44, he's not a young prospect, but Li Yang's ballsy lash at the heart of a socioeconomic blemish should set him on the fast track to Sixth Generation stardom.
With coal-streaked faces hardly discernible from their gray surroundings, Blind Shaft's Song Jinming (Li Yixiang) and Tang Zhaoyang (Wang Shuangbao) take one last drag off a group cigarette before dropping to the black floor of a mine with a handful of others. Headlamps emerge from the darkness as Song and Tang trod deep into a corner of the cave, shovels in hand. A few moments of work, they set explosives, and Tang calls out to his "brother," nearby. A fellow worker approaches and friendly banter ensues, but the man suddenly receives a deadly strike on head. Song and Tang furtively step out, blow the explosives, and leave him buried in smoky rubble. At the surface, Tang convincingly claims faulty-shaft-collapse and argues with the mine owner over compensation for the death of his brother, threatening to reveal the illegal operation. For fear of being found out and shut down, the owner concedes, sending Tang and Song away with 28,000 yen in their pockets. Not bad for a day's work.
A night in a nearby town includes a trip to a red-light brothel where the duo merrily sing "long live socialism" to the marching beat of Karaoke machine. One hand on a prostitute's thigh, the other on a glass of alcohol, not a word of mourning is uttered. Over soup the following day, an eerie truth lingers at the back of Shaft's cutting dialogue and when Tang runs into an impish 16-year-old outside the noodle shop, the duo's M.O. becomes frighteningly clear. The teen, Yuan Fengming (Wang Baoqiang), is in search of money to pay for his sister's education; he left school himself for lack of proper funds after his father went missing. Tang lets him in on the mining jobs and agrees to let the boy tag a long under one decievingly innocuous condition: He has to pose as Song's nephew.
The scam is that simple. Song and Tang drift from mine to mine along the fringes of the Shanxii province, forced to work in the illegal shafts due to the job-starved economic environment. The meager pay doesn't amount to much especially considering the insufferable living situations and backbreaking work, so mid-mine, they pick up other job-hunters-cum-family-members and fake a collapse. A little blackmail, they collect, hit the town hard and do it all over again.
With current victim in tow, they quickly find another mine and settle in. But when Song learns that the boy's deceased father was their previous victim, his one-track motivations merge with a disarming empathy. Delaying the murder, he argues with Tang that Yuan should lose his virginity before he's offed; in their efforts to let the boy "die a man," they take him to a brothel, but innocent, youthful guilt intervenes and the experience doesn't end well for anybody. Slowly, Song's feelings for the naive boy begin to interfere with the macabre business relationship he's established with Tang and when the time comes for the deed to be done, Shaft's deadly denouement flips expectation on its head. In a short coda, billowing smoke rises from a crematorium. In a world in which life seems so fleeting, death so easily forgotten, Yang's final image of loss possesses an ineffable gravity, understated and towering overhead.
Yang's background in documentary film is an obvious influence on Shaft's look and feel; here, we're considering the work of a filmmaker who is interested in succinctly revealing the dire truth his country's government would prefer to sweep under the rug. The extensive press packet notes that more than 7,000 miners die each year, and recalls a 2001 mine collapse in which the death of more than 40 miners was covered up with support of the local government who helped bury and cremate the bodies. Shaft's diegesis echoes Yang's own words. He writes, "The mine owners do not spend money on buying the necessary safety equipment, but rather use huge sums of money to bribe the party cadres and government bureaucrats, in order to obtain the various permits...(they) totally disregard the lives of the miners...there is no protection and guarantee for the lives of the miners at all." He continues, "Under the pressure of heavy duties and taxes, many peasants can hardly make a living by growing crops...Many children have to stop going to school and start working because they cannot pay the school fees... On television and newspapers, all people can see are the big achievements of the developing Chinese economy. But who is there to care about people: human sentiments, the souls and minds of the people, and social morality? Who cares about this huge mass of people struggling at the lowest stratum of the Chinese society?"
His statements hit harder when considering Yang's approach criminalizes his protagonists, then works backward to draw some understanding from the audience. Most importantly, Blind Shaft is far from any political propaganda and its devotion to the fictional complexities of character, mark a discerning documentarian at the helm. Honorably, amidst the current influx of ill-crafted pseudo-documentary confusions, Yang chose to go one way. Uniquely, he chose to do so employing all of the appropriate artistic tropes to justify his decision.
In America, and in many places throughout the world, "making a feature film" is synonymous with "gigantic risk." The money alone requires that the film meet a modicum of success if the film maker plans to continue his career anytime soon. We champion those domestic directors who still manage find a balance between art and economics, politics and (enough) acceptance to grant their work a theatrical release while maintaining its integrity. It's hard here, there's no doubt. But even the stalwart cineaste who considers himself devoted to the highest artistic norms has to reconsider the ways in which he has let his own scale slide, when faced with a film maker like Li Yang.
I mentioned before my fascination with the China's Sixth Generation filmmakers, a moniker which brings to mind an artistic devotion unlike almost any in world cinema today. Li's opening paragraph in the director's statement says a lot. "In order to make Blind Shaft my crew and I [had] to risk our lives at times. Now the film is finally finished, but to me the dangers are still there. This film will be banned from being released in China, and I will face the unfortunate destiny of being banned from making a film in China. Many friends asked me, why must I risk my life to make a film like this?" Blind Shaft will most likely play for a couple weeks in New York at a small art house, maybe for a split second somewhere in L.A. Li Yang will never be able to work in his country again. That says it all.
© 2004 by - MATTHEW PLOUFFE
