THE 2014 LIVE-ACTION OSCAR SHORTS

Oscar season means many things to many people, but one of the best is that, thanks to the folks at Shorts HD, it's the only time all year that most of us have even the smallest opportunity to see short films on the big screen And that is something I look forward to every year with enormous enthusiasm. So without further ado, allow me to dive right into the matter of the five films nominated for Best Live-Action Short, and now screening here and there throughout the country, in advance of a VOD run sometime soon.

"But Tim," you are undoubtedly about to ask (irrespective of the fact that I do not live in your computer & cannot hear you), "you're such an animation buff. Why aren't you reviewing the animated shorts?" Well, don't forget, while I'm merely a lusty, amateur animation buff over here, I'm actually a professional animation buff over at the Film Experience. And that's where you can find my thoughts on the other slate.

Aya (Oded Binnun and Mihal Brezis, Israel / France)

If I have it right, this is the current frontrunner to win in the eyes of most pundits. And I won't claim that I feel unmixedly good about that - it's one of the weaker films of a generally strong slate. That's less because of anything specific it does wrong, and more because it's simply not very focused or thoughtful about how it wants to tell its story: at 40 minutes, it's not only the longest of the nominees, it's also brushing against the Academy's definition of "short film" rather recklessly. Nor are all 40 of those minutes used to equally good effect. There's a lot of time spent on conversations that are a bit more indulgent than they frankly need to be.

The titular Aya (Sarah Adler) is waiting to pick someone up at the airport when she's mistaken by a Danish scholar named Overby (Ulrich Thomsen) as his driver; she refuses to correct him until miles into their drive to Jerusalem, at which point he doesn't seem to care much. The film eventually reveals itself as a parable of dissatisfied people seeking new connections, but it relies an awful lot on a kind-of twist ending to make most of that clear, which leaves a lot of scenes of talking about nothing in particular, all set in the front seat of a car. There's goodness and insight within the film, though it needs to be ferreted out of the bloat, and the characters who always feel a bit more like screenwriting conceits than psychologies. 6/10

* * *

Boogaloo and Graham (Michael Lennox and Ronan Blaney, UK)

Can't have the Oscars without darling children getting into light scrapes while something serious burbles on unseen in the background. "Something serious", in this case, is the Troubles; the 1970s Belfast-set film manages to wedge in a late scene involving a political prisoner and the violence of the region that is all the more garish for how much the film otherwise has not the smallest interest in the political or social ramifications of its setting. And boy, was I ever ready to go harsh on it.

But then, as darling children movies go, Boogaloo and Graham - named for the pet chickens given to a pair of young brothers (Riley Hamilton and Aaron Lynch) by their father (Martin McCann) in a fit of poor judgment - has the benefit of actual darlings, with just enough snarky spike in their personalities that it's not just the cloying sitcom nonsense it so readily could have been. Its insights into human behavior are trite, and the punchline at the end - if that's the word for something so calm and subdued and philosophically Irish - suggests that the film doesn't really know what it's trying to be about, either. But as a snapshot of a quirky family, it has its pleasures, even if it is undoubtedly the weakest thing here. 6/10

* * *

Butter Lamp (Hu Wei and Julien Féret, France / China)

Okay, we're starting to get to the really good stuff. Once again, we have here a film that doesn't announce its meaning until the final moments of the final shot, but in this case, it's a much more effective strategy, allowing the film to build up a sense of mystery along with its rather effective charm. We find a rarely-seen, but constantly chatting photographer (Genden Punstock) positioning groups and individuals from a Tibetan village in front of his portable backdrops (the film camera adopts the perspective of his still camera throughout: nothing but static frames with people staring into the lens, and it gains a weird energy as a result as it goes along), creating touristy snapshots of these people in towns, at religious sites, standing atop the Great Wall of China, and at Hong Kong Disneyland.

The latter two examples specifically foreshadow the film's ideas about the forcible homogenization of the Tibetan people into whatever the Chinese government says they have to be, but the bulk of that work is done by the modestly ominous suggestions of the final shot, which lands with a thud in the silent space left by the chatting and laughter of the rest of the film. For it is awfully funny, looking with its unforced observational candor at people being uncontainable messes no matter how badly the photographer tries to choreograph them. In truth, the whole thing is a bit concepty and editorially heavy-handed in the last moments, but the implicit humanism of the whole thing is so affecting that I can't really complain. 8/10

* * *

Parvaneh (Talkhon Hamzavi and Stefan Eichenberger, Switzerland)

I have a suspicion that I should find this to be corny bullshit, and yet somehow, it really works. Teenager Parvaneh (Nissa Kashani) is an Afghan refugee living in Switzerland, and she needs to send some money back home. The trip to Zurich to find a place to wire the money is daunting, but it's the easy part - Parvaneh's papers and age mean that she can do no such thing, which means she must hunt around for a kind stranger. The only one she finds is a slightly older punk, Emely (Cheryl Graf), who agrees to help for a small fee, but the store is closed by the time the girls get back there. On the spot, Emely proposes that Parvaneh should pal around with her and they can go back in the morning. In the meantime, it's a night of music, clubs, flirting with boys, and finding out that the two have a lot in common.

Clichés don't come any mustier, but the Euro-realist style and incredibly laid-back naturalistic acting on display help enormously to make Parvaneh seem more insightful and raw than it sounds. There's no sweetie-pie fun going on; the whole time, Parvaneh seems slightly dazed and alarmed at the speed and danger of life in the urban West, compared to her safe, rural enclave of fellow refugees, and though the connection she makes with Emely is clearly important and unprecedented, the film doesn't pretend to have solved The Immigrant Problem. Bless it for that.

Anyway, the acting is sharp, Kashani especially, and while the style is a bit Dardennes-light, director Hamzavi wields it with canny discipline for when it can heighten the narrative vs. when it can serve to accentuate the moments in between narrative. I would never want to see this as a feature, but it's a pretty thoughtful 25 minutes. 8/10

* * *

The Phone Call (Mat Kirkby and James Lucas, UK)

The other frontrunner, and I rather think the best of the five (though Parvaneh comes close). It's a sterling example of something that could never work so well except as a snug, 20-minute short: set up a single situation, play it out, get the hell out of there. Heather (Sally Hawkins) works at a virtually empty crisis call center, and she picks up early one shift to hear a very sad man identifying himself as Stan (Jim Broadbent, never seen). At first trying simply to cheer Stan up, Heather teases out after a few minutes that he's just taken a lethal dose of pills, having wanted to kill himself ever since his wife died. And he's not calling for help, but simply to have company while he drifts off into death.

It's an acting showcase: director Kikby rather sensibly understands that a film which consists of almost nothing other than a phone conversation in which we never see one of the two participants needs to have an immovable rock on the visible end of the line. The Phone Call would wither and die without having somebody that Kirkby could point his camera at for minutes, confident that whatever is happening on her face is bound to be interesting, and Hawkins is that somebody. She has to build a character using hardly any backstory, and then communicate a desire to be sympathetic, a steely determination to save Stan from himself, and flustered panic that she is by no means equipped to deal with this situation, and she does all of this so well that it doesn't even register as acting; the film gets to skip right ahead to the part where it asks us to consider what it would be like to be Heather, tossed into this horrible situation; but also to be Stan, that sad and empty. It's a lovely portrait of mental states in turmoil, concise and streamlined and driven enough that the lack of flash doesn't register till it's all over. 8/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: BLACK COAL, THIN ICE (DIAO YINAN, CHINA)

Screens at CIFF: 10/11 & 10/13 & 10/17
World premiere: 12 February, 2014, Berlin International Film Festival

It might have been filmed in color; it might have been filmed in China; it might have been filmed decades after of the essential cultural context of the post-WWII America; but other than those little things, Black Coal, Thin Ice is one of the most all-around perfect example of a film noir to have come out in years. True, any one of those elements is arguably an automatic disqualification, let alone all three, but with its beautiful but menacing cinematography, its portrayal of urban life as inherently prone to violence and moral decay, and its choice of protagonist is a drunk, slovenly ex-cop, plagued by memories of the case that got away, and given a chance to make things right at great personal cost. The tune is right even if the instruments are funny. And the great overriding theme of all the great films noirs - you are alone, nobody can be trusted, and the world around you is dying - is proudly on display in every beat of the darkly thrilling mystery that the film explores.

The opening is in 1999, when a dismembered body is found in coal-firing plants scattered all across a province; nobody can figure out how such a geographically expansive crime could have been committed, let alone who could have committed it, but cops Zhang Zili (Liao Fan) and Liang Zhijun (Wang Xuebing) doggedly track the killer anyway, and Zhang even thinks he has a solution of sorts. But a random run-in with some desperate thugs ends tragically, with Zhang dropping out and spending the next five years turning himelf into the most dissolute reprobate he could manage. He only emerges when a series of copycat murders starts up, and he figures out quickly enough that the newly dead bodies share a connection to a dry cleaning proprietor named Wu Zhizhen (Gwei Lun Mei), who happens to be the beautiful, dark-eyed widow of the very same man who ended up distributed in coal bins throughout China. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that she has some secrets that need exploring, and it doesn't take a psychic to figure out that Zhang is going to end up fascinated with the enticing woman of mystery for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with solving a cold case or bringing the mad dismembering coal-obsessed killer to justice.

You could not possibly be generous enough to call any of what happens in Black Coal, Thin Ice original (incidentally, the original Chinese title translates to Daytime Fireworks, which suggests enormously different things relative to the film's content; writer-director Diao Yinan selected the titles for both languages). And while it's tempting to read into it some kind of sociological dissection of life in urban China, that would require us to overlook how much of the film's DNA stretches back to 1940s Los Angeles. But originality and social insight are both devilishly easy to overvalue: the justification for Black Coal, Thin Ice isn't that it's daring and meaningful and unprecedented in its complexity (though it would be nice for the Goldener Bär winner at Berlin to be at least one of those things, maybe), but that it's simply a really great version of a long-reliable stock type.

A really great version. If nothing else (and there's plenty else), it's one of the very best-shot films of 2014 (and if I hadn't just seen Timbuktu at the same film festival, I don't think I'd mess around with this ambivalent "one of the best" nonsense). Dong Jinsong, the cinematographer, has a small career to date, but he's clearly a name to keep looking out for: his work is an astonishing mix of classic noir chiaroscuro and glossy, sickly-glamorous candy-colored neon just absolutely everywhere. And while the film doesn't resort to anything as programmatic as color-coding, it's definitely the case that the colors haven't been chosen arbitrarily: there's a scene in a car where one character is lit in blue and red, another is all green, and the cumulative effect (beyond being spookily unreal) is blissfully, intuitively correct: coolness contrasting with rot. I have no idea what colors signify in Chinese culture, but to my Western eyes, it was a perfect little encapsulation of the warring psychologies in that car, and I loved it as much as I have loved any single piece of cinematic lighting all year.

The addition of expressionistic color to the film noir template is inspired, and probably the single most unique element of Black Coal, Thin Ice: in terms of how it structures its narrative, it is elegantly formulaic without stooping to be predictable. And this is a fine thing, in this genre of all genres; in presenting a fatal, deterministic world, the fact that the script falls into generally predetermined contours ends up strengthening our sense that this is not a world where individual people have much of a chance to do anything to change what's going anyway. Still, watching Diao take his characters through the paces is particularly thrilling. And the way that shots are repeated and slightly altered (sometimes by as simple a thing as seeing the same angle in daytime vs. nightime) contributes still more to the sense of a ritual being acted out, beyond the characters.

Not everything is so strictly mired in this idea of the city as a shiny colored hell where your fate is already set: the messy, anarchic ending rather pointedly disputes that notion, for one, and so do the handful of scenes of startling violence (there is little action, and none of it graphic, in the film, but what's there is always jarring, even just a scene of a killer throwing body parts off a bridge). In other words, only moments of violence or chaos can upset the merciless order of this world. Not a comforting notion at all; it's not a comforting film, though. It's a diagnosis and exposition of a cruel world that stomps on humans and their humanity, and its visual beauty is also, frequently, unnatural and even a little gross: it is the beauty of a snake or a poisonous flower. It doesn't end with the pointless loss of the most deliberately nihilistic films noirs, and it even seems to warily toy around with the idea that "hope" is a thing that exists, somewhere. But goal #1 is still and always to confront the darkness of people and the society that births them, and no film has done that with more exquisite craftsmanship and captivating narrative tension in a long while.

8/10

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DESPERATE TIMES

Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin is in some ways a harsh departure for the filmmaker, one of the reigning masters of Chinese cinema; the quiet gracefulness of his films best-known in the English-speaking world has been replaced by anger and violence, a lingering despair clinging to the movie like a bramble. But at the same time, it's business as usual for a director whose work has all explored the trauma of a swiftly-changing China caught in the gap between tradition and modernity, Maoist Communism and robber-baron capitalism. Each of its four episodes, centering around a different character in a different province, is about the sin perpetrated by a single person, as promised by the title; but is even more about the capricious, inscrutable society that turns human beings into scrambling scavengers, sketching out quickly but crisply how it is that they were driven to lash out with destructive violence.

The script was based upon four news stories Jia encountered in his perusals of The State of Modern China, and there is a certain formulaic quality to each of them that does absolutely no favors to the movie's pacing; but boy, if you wander into A Touch of Sin expecting something that's in any way easy to watch, like the wuxia-influenced thriller that the director has weirdly indicated this was meant to be, then you're screwed regardless. If it's formulaic and repetitive, that's only because it's also essentially ritualistic, and its four individual stories only build up such an excellent whole due to the sense of fatalism that pervades them - the sense of the same bad things happening over and over, seen well in advance and impossible to stop anyway.

That's not to say that Jia's script isn't a little distressingly schematic, though that comes less at the level of structure than in the somewhat arch way that each of the four chapters seems hellbent on representing a different aspect of Chinese life; there's a little strain in the way the film attempts to find a completely different psychological and economic register for each new protagonist even after having already determined that they need to be thematically linked. This is only notably problematic in the third segment, the clear "one of these things is not like the others" winner of the movie, and not just because it's the only one anchored by a woman; it's also the place where the climactic outburst of violence is presented in the most fanciful, stylised way, perhaps because it's also the only chapter in which that violence is self-evidently justified (she's lashing out at attempted rapists). Which doesn't make it bad, necessarily; it's just a little off. Sort of like how the fourth segment ends up feeling weirdly light and trivial compared to the first three - it's not "bad", either, though it's perhaps not a great finale.

At any rate, the film's clearest and most well-articulated segment is the first, in which a rural miner named Dahai (Jiang Wu) is so outraged by the imbalanced local political scene, so divorced from the egalitarian society Chinese policy supposedly encourages, that he spends all of his free time agitating for reform and punishment meted out to the guilty. When no such satisfaction comes, something snaps in his head, and he goes on a blood-soaked killing spree to weed out everyone he perceives as being unjust. That's broadly the pattern followed by the film's later stories, all of which are equally pointed and angry about some failure in China's national character (the most sublimely peculiar is in the final segment, which largely takes place in what I can only think to describe as a patriotism-themed brothel, where the hollow promise of Communism and the avarice of capitalism are free to mingle in a most leeringly symbolic way).

Dahai's story is the most direct and effective, though it's not fair to use it as a stick to beat up on A Touch of Sin, except insofar as it is also the most clearly based in genre, and thus makes promises that Jia isn't really looking to keep. This is much more a film about desperate people making bad, but defensible decisions, like spa receptionist Xiao Yu (Zhao Tao), or bad, and humanely pathetic decisions, like Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan), who falls afoul of a peculiarly Kafkaesque bureaucratic rule after a workplace accident, and tries to find some way to keep himself afloat economically as a result. Or just bad, but not without reason, as in the case of Zhou San (Wang Baoqiang), who opens the movie with a prologue in which he, riding a motorcycle (that most romantic icon of independent will), blankly guns down a trio of gangsters in the middle of the countryside. It's the perfect start to a film describing a moral universe in which random, even arbitrary violence is only a sane response to the implacable institutional decay and corruption that infects all of life.

The film is impeccably shot by Yu Likwai with an eye towards just this dynamic, creating a world that is obviously rotten and crumbling, yet which is also quite shockingly beautiful in every moment as well; there's a hard kind of dignity to the images of poverty in the film, which helps it to avoid exploiting its setting whatsoever. It is not realist, though it flits with a realist aesthetic at times; it's something much closer to a rough working class poetry, finding moments of beauty in all contexts and contrasting violence and grubbing with art and culture (the film is somewhat bookended by operatic performances, though I don't know if Chinese opera has anything like the snobbish cultural cachet of European opera) in a way that eliminates any distinction between them, much as the story structure collides four disparate locations and four unique protagonists in a single flow of ideas that makes them feel like part of a whole, rather than individual actors. In this way, the film considers Society-with-a-capital-S from simultaneously general and specific perspectives, and feels like Jia considers not just four stories of sin but the entire way that people exist in the world to be the real subject of his movie.

It's daunting, and more ambitious than any one film could maybe survive - the seams show, and it's hard not to wonder if the energy is slowly evacuating the movie, particularly in the fourth story. But even as a flawed, maybe over-complex movie, A Touch of Sin is gloriously messy and humane, a passionate exploration of humanity that bends cinematic conventions and tones back and forth with energetic willfulness. It is a film that could only be made by a fearless director fully aware of his powers, and unafraid to grapple with ideas that might break him. It is emphatic, alive cinema.

8/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: MOTHERS (XU HUI-JING, CHINA)

Screens at CIFF: 10/19 & 10/21
World premiere: 29 September, 2012, CNEX Documentary Film Festival

It's not the exact literal first thing that happens in Mothers, but it's awfully early on that director Xu Hui-jing, in voice-over, explains his particular relationship to China's "One Child" population control policy: he was the second child born to his mother, and has known for much of his life that legally, he's not "supposed" to exist.

From that moment on, there's no doubt that Mothers comes from a place of intense personal meaning, as Xu travels to his home village of Ma to examine with tremendous intimacy the way that people's lives are impacted by the most draconian extreme of that policy, the enforced sterilisation program that has already been visited upon a majority of Ma's adult female population. And not just the lives of the women involved; the film spends just as much time with the bureaucrats responsible for enforcing the program, in particular Zhang Qingmei, the Director of Women's Care for the area, who sees absolutely no conflict between her official duties and her off-hours work caring for a local fertility temple.

It feels downright vindictive to start off by saying something harsh against something that is so evidently a passion project, the primary merits of which are inextricably connected to the director's intimate knowledge of Ma and the people living there, but I'm going to do it anyway: at 68 minutes long, Mothers needs a hell of a lot more focus than it gets in this form. There are, effectively, two different movies jockeying for attention, and both of them have the potential to be very good: on the one hand, Zhang and her colleagues approaching with bland resignation the business of enforcing a cruel and capricious law whose connection to sensible family planning, if there ever was one, has been lost in a thicket of ill-defined laws and governmental; on the other, the families of Ma stuck with the fuzzy end of this particular lollipop, and particularly those women able, through smarts and good luck, to at least temporarily avoid the officials' grasp.

There's clearly a lot of overlap between the two stories, and Xu exploits that for all it's worth, but it still comes down to one thing: this is 68 minutes long, and there are a lot of people to cover and a lot of angles to examine, and there's not enough time to do it properly. What Mothers ends up being in its final form, is something of a procedural thriller, as we're presented with the increasingly frustrated bureaucrats trying to scrounge up women to operate on (this becomes increasingly absurd in a Kafkaesque manner as the film progresses), intercut with the villagers' attempts to resist the long arm of the law. On the edges, there are lengthy tangents that introduces us to the lives of various individuals on both sides, presenting them as whole people and not just players in a high-stakes chess game, and while these are by and large the best and most interesting individual moments, they're also the most obvious distractions from the main throughline of the narrative, which already feels like it's pulling focus from the political argument that Xu consistently walks right up to making, without ever getting around to making it.

Rhetorically, the film is a mess, and that's all there is to it. There is a plus side to this, though, which is that the individual moments are so interesting on a human level that even as the whole package adds up to one big blank spot, there's no point during the watching of it where it feels that way - privately speaking, I'd have liked a bit more time with the wearied villagers of Ma and less with the joking, banally cruel government functionaries, but in all cases, the individual beat-by-beat moments of human life are captivating on the most essential level that we are looking at people with interesting lives behaving in interesting ways. And this, of course, is greatly cinematic, even if it doesn't feel like it quite overlaps with any of the larger currents of the film that Xu overtly claims to make.

There's an unfaked intimacy to these scenes of people going about their business, one that clearly comes from the director's familiarity with this place and the way this community operates, and when Mothers is all about humanity, it is awfully good. There's certainly a way to tie this back together with an activist stance about unyielding, ice cold bureaucracy, and in places, Mothers even reaches that point for a minute or two. But the movie doesn't have a relaxed enough pace for that; it doesn't have time to linger on moments of domestic life and also present the government machine and draw lines between them and conclusions from them. It is a rushed movie, full of beauty and rage, but not focused enough, clean enough, or deliberate enough to allow that beauty and rage to soak in for its best effect.

6/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: THE BLINDING SUNLIGHT (YU LIU, CHINA)

Screens at CIFF: 10/11 & 10/13 & 10/16
World premiere: 23 August, 2013, Montréal World Film Festival

The Blinding Sunlight, the directorial debut of Chinese filmmaker Yu Liu, wastes no time in setting up its aesthetics and its themes alike: the opening shot is in the backseat of a cramped vehicle looking through the windshield (soon enough, we'll learn that it's a motorcycle altered to have a wide, enclosed space for passengers), and it is very consciously artless, if you follow me, filthy, harshly-lit, cramped framing. The soundtrack is dominated by two things: over-emphasised street noises in the background, and a Party official speaking on the radio about the government's plans to encourage pay equality and fuller employment, using the most banal and non-commital phrases and proving that bureaucratic doubletalk is the same in all cultures.

So here's what we know, all in the first minute; The Blinding Sunlight is going to boast the kind of grotty production values that since the 1940s have always and only been used to connote bitter, earnest realism; and if it wasn't obvious enough from that (since "realist" films have an overwhelming tendency to circle around economic stories), The Blinding Sunlight will be telling a tale of how government policies designed to protect the poor end up being so vague and institutionally impersonal that the end up frustrating the exact people they're meant to protect. And lo, this is what turns out to be the case.

The particular man at the center of this story of crushing the poor and worsening their lot is Li (Liu Chunqi, I think; I didn't take great notes of the credits, and good information about the film online is hard as hell to find), the middle member of a tri-generational domestic situation, and the owner of that motorcycle, which he operates - illegally, we must note, and in full awareness that what he's doing is illegal - as a taxi. This gives him just barely enough money to augment the unemployment he receives from the government, delivered in the form of unsmiling case workers who hold the threat of cutting off his dole money if he doesn't drop the taxi service like a loaded gun. Living with Li are his aging father, who collects trash for recycling, and his son, in the middle of an imploding school career and far more interested in hanging out with his dissolute friends and frequenting the local brothel than making any attempt to keep himself from descending into the same barely-sustained working class hell where his dad ended up.

Cheery stuff all around, really, and Yu doubles down by showcasing the broken-down neighborhood where the family lives in unblinking wide shots that emphasise just how dirty and run-down things are. And in case the shots of filthy alleys aren't enough, he and cinematographer Yang Ming desaturate several of the images, sometimes all the way down to pure greyscale, to leach the last hint of life and warmth out of the material. They also use an extremely limited number of set-ups (which might have been, originally, a labor and cost-saving idea, but it works thematically), with virtually every interior space filmed the same way every time we see it, so that the lack of variety, creativity, and freedom faced by this family every moment is beaten into our very faces, one last time.

I am torn. Not between "this is good" and "this is unrelievedly fucking depressing", though that's the case; realism is not, by its nature, a cheery style. No, I am torn between admiring the commitment and intensity with which Yu presents this grinding story and this miserable domestic hell, and thinking warmly of his passionate drive to make this project (in addition to directing, he's the writer, producer, and editor, and self-financed the whole thing), and reacting with stricken awe at the largely invisible-in-the-West side of China being revealed by this most fixedly documentarian story; and wishing that all of it were, y'know, good. However easy it is to admire Yu's energy, his aesthetic isn't terribly engaging, whether by design (the repeated shot set-ups, effective though they are, become awfully boring to watch), or because of newness and a lack of intuitive filmmaking ability. I think, for example, of a three-shot that is filmed in the most basic, flat way possible, a little above the characters' heads down to a little below their feet, like we never evolved past 1903. Some shots work, like any time that the blinding sunlight of the title gets to play a major part, washing out the frame and creating interesting silhouettes and shapes; mostly, though, the camera is being used to record activity, not shape it, and that's simply not good filmmaking, anyway you approach it.

The main problem, though, is the cast, which in the finest tradition of the genre is made up solely of non-professional actors. And Christ, is it obvious; even considering my longstanding impatience for this common gimmick, the actors in The Blinding Sunlight are unconvincing in the extreme, reading lines so stiffly that even a viewer without the tiniest understanding of any Chinese dialect, or any language at all outside of the Indo-European family can notice that something's off. Or enacting the single worst staged slap I have ever seen, and that's not the one where the actor fails to come within half a foot of his target's face, something so wildly off the mark that I'm inclined to generosity and assume that he was scripted to miss. However the setting and story work to create a unique impression of Chinese poverty, the cast ensures that we never regard the characters as humans, but only figures being posed in the locations, and that alone is enough to keep The Blinding Sunlight from registering as more than a noble curiosity.

6/10

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