Defense of the Underrated Film

Defense of the underrated film

         is an art film by famous Chinese director Jiang Wen recently released on screen. Comparing to his previous film , which won great success among public audience, this latest film was not high-rated by most of people. However, without reading any film reviews before watching, I was very intrigued and impressed by the film itself and regarded it as a very innovative and inspiring piece of art.

        Firstly, in order to review the film fairly, we shall take it as an independent film, so as to avoid comparison with his previous highly rated work. Since people are inclined to expect him to make an even better work after being very satisfied by his last one, the unexpectedly different style of this film may scare the audience and thus psychologically make them refuse to understand it.

        The main character Ma in the film is acted by the director himself; oriented around him, the episodes happened in the film are not connected together by a realistic logic but more like by director’s own arbitrary fantasy. Some people blame the film by pointing out its plot flaws, whereas I think since the film is not a story-based film, we should not use a conventional “Hollywood pipeline” standard to criticize it; but instead, take it as a moving Dadaism art, which offers open interpretation. In terms of the techniques, the director uses parody by dressing his characters in the code same as those in some well-known classic films, which creates a sense of déjà vu illusion to audience; he even tones certain scenes into black and white in order to imitate the style of some old films. Moreover, if viewing the film in a process of decoding the implicit meaning that the director intelligently fabricated under its visual surface, many ironic connotations could be found out within frame. For example, even though the setting of the story was in Shanghai, 1920, when the main character Ma was arrested and accused as a cruel violent murderer despite the fact that it was just an unintentional accident, he said that ‘then killer should look like a killer’ and immediately changed into a dark punk costume-this could necessarily satirize those unfair official judgment executed in our real contemporary society.

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