Jiang cheng xia ri, a review by Danae Cassandra
Jiang cheng xia ri (
Luxury Car)
2006, China
A old schoolteacher leaves his rural village to travel to Wuhan, looking for his missing son whom his dying wife wishes to see one last time. While he searches Wuhan he stays with his daughter, who works as an escort and is dating a mobster.
This film is part of The Global Lens Collection, which also released
Mahiha ashegh mishavand which we watched earlier. Their stated purpose is to "promote cross-cultural understanding through cinema" and I've come to see, in the films I watched from their collection, that perhaps it is through a slice of life in the culture.
Here we see parents estranged from their children, a father searching for his son, speaking of his son, a mother asking to see her son before she dies ... all while ignoring their daughter Yan Hong, a beautiful young woman who so obviously yearns for a connection to her parents, for their love and their approval. She tries very hard to hide the seamier side of her job from her father, and to hide her lover's true identity.
Like the other films I've watched from this collection, this is a low budget film. This film is not about special effects or grand production values. It's about people, about characters and their relationships and the story that develops around them. They are very realistic people too. The mobster is short, balding and paunchy, not some hot ultra-fit dude. He's doing his mobster thing, but it's also obvious he truly cares about Yan Hong and tries to please her, as well as protect her. Qi Ming, the father, also comes off as a real person, someone who doesn't know how to communicate with his daughter yet you get the feeling that he wants to, that he wants a relationship but that there's a gap he can't seem to bridge. Yan Hong can't seem to bridge it either, can't talk to her father about what she wants, even when it's obvious she wants him to love her the way he loves her brother. Her role is played by Tian Yuan, a Chinese pop star who is simply gorgeous and seems to me a pretty good actress - she says a lot in silence, in her expressions and body language, in the way she has Yan Hong look at her father, look at her lover, look at herself.
A good little film, an interesting look at China in a way you don't see in the Chinese films that hit mainstream US. There's no martial arts, no cinematic tricks, no mythology, and not a lot of action. It's a family story, a character story, a look at life in modern China.
Overall: 3/5
(From Danae's reviews on April 12th, 2011)
Users: 0
May 17, 2024, 11:02:49 PM
