Ground Zero: 2007 San Francisco International Film Festival (Part 7)

The Other Half (2006, Dir. Ling Yiang)

"Half of life is fucking up, the other half is dealing with it."

-- Henry Rollins

On the face of it, this is an oddity of a film -- a modest indie feature set in Sichuan province, using a cast of unknowns (mostly friends and relatives of the director-producer team of Ling Yiang and Peng Shan), shot on consumer-grade DV, graced with some of the most primitive foley effects you can imagine, a film that puts the "low" in "low budget". But the history and fact of its existence might be the even greater story here, and a sign of what the future might hold for indie filmmaking in China.

The story is reminiscent of the "cinema verite" projects of Zhang Jiake (Platform, Unknown Pleasures) -- it's a long, almost clinical look at small lives in a small town. Zeng Xiaofei (played by, er, Zeng Xiaofei) is a young, average woman (although everyone she meets notes her facial similarity to Zhang Ziyi) who ends up taking a job as a stenographer for a law office that appears to be run in what remains of a barnhouse. There we're exposed to a multitude of stories from clients who come in, seeking legal counsel. As you would expect, their stories are nutty and whimsical, and are lifted from real-life cases: husbands who bite off the ears of their wives; wives who steal their husbands' clothes; a PR flak who wants to sue her company because her liver's been destroyed by all the late-night drinking binges she's been forced to take her clients on; a woman who isn't allowed to divorce an army officer.

Outside the office, life unspools slowly in Xiaofei's little town, although there are alarming signs that things are going to pot. The pretty woman who runs the wedding shop down the street from Xiaofei is murdered (we don't see the act, we only see the boarded-up shop in the aftermath, followed by its transition into a seedy mahjong parlor). state-sanctioned news broadcasts assuring the citizenry that the local chemical plant is "completely safe" ring hollow. Xiaofei's mother parades prospective grooms before her, including a local boss who insists on whipping out his laptop and explaining his business on their first date. In the meantime, Xiaofei's heart belongs only to Deng Gang (Deng Gang), a ne'er-do-well with gambling issues and a fear of long-term commitment -- or might he be involved with the recent spate of murders in town? Things get complicated when Xiaofei's long-missing father shows up and the chemical plant experiences an explosion that throws everything into disarray.

Most of the film is composed of long and medium shots of the characters and their surroundings, and in the process we see a bombed-out town: rainy flyovers and intersections, cracked streets, tawdry little dance halls and restaurants. Despite the limited budget, Ying wrings out some striking compositions, including a final shot down the length of a bridge that haunts in its matter-of-factness. Primitivist in the telling (the acting and overall look won't win any awards), the movie is a bit overlong with repeated episodes, and we're kept at a remove from our heroine's troubles and fears. In that sense, the film is kin to Zhang Jiake -- we observe these people like bugs under a glass, but we also sense a certain understanding and sympathy for their plights, as distant as they may seem. And the glancing criticisms of urban decay and the government's role in said decay are surprisingly strong, too.

And that's where the true import of the film lies; in the Q&A with the film's producer and director, it came out that since the film was never intended for standard theatrical distribution, it never had to pass through the usual censors that screen films in China, and went straight to the DVD (and bootleg DVD) circuit, where it apparently has made the rounds all over the country. That type of artistic freedom might have seemed impossible only a few years ago, but with the explosion of multimedia in China, the fact that The Other Half, with its unsparing look at disintegrating town life, is making festival rounds (just before it arrived in SF, it was at a Korean film festival) in an uncensored format bodes well for filmmakers who want to take on more experimental, hard-hitting stories without fear of reprisal. In a developing industry that's already experiencing the prestige picture/indie movie bifurcation that's happened in America (compare Curse of the Golden Flower to this film), something like The Other Half, flaws and all, is a depth charge, a small but essential step forward.