Archive for January, 2014
Rumour Has It: Caught In The Web movie review
Self-perception, Caught In The Web, 2012
Although local multiplexes and arthouses are stuffed to the gills with prestige Hollywood Oscar-bait at this time of year, for some reason there are also three new films by top Chinese directors opening this weekend in San Francisco. Bay Area Asian cinephiles can thus take a break from furry-footed halflings, lost-in-space astronauts, and ironic 1970s flashback films.
Chen Kaige’s Caught In The Web looks at the corrosive power of gossip, fueled by the virality of the internet. Gao Yuan Yuan stars as Ye Lanqiu, a woman who’s just received a terminal cancer diagnosis. Riding home on a city bus she sits in a daze, oblivious to the bus conductor chivvying her to give up her seat to an elderly man. As is per usual in this modern world, the encounter is recorded via cameraphone and uploaded to the web by an ambitious young Internet journalist, with the assistance of her hits-happy editor, who salivates with the prospect of posting a trending topic to her online news site. The video goes viral, with an ensuing outcry from China’s netizens, and Ye, dubbed “Sunglasses Girl” by nosy web-dwellers, soon becomes the target of a hyperaccelerated storm of controversy, with her life and character minutely scrutinized and critiqued.
Sunglasses girl, Caught In The Web, 2012
With 600 million registered users and 60 million active users per day on weibo, the Chinese version of twitter, China has a ridiculously busy online culture and the film cleverly indicts the hearsay, rumor, and conjecture spawned by that culture and the lightning-speed with which a person’s name can be dragged through the mud. By focusing on the interweb’s vicious gang mentality Chen, the director of Farewell, My Concubine, (one of the seminal critiques of Mao’s China), also obliquely references the Cultural Revolution’s practice of betrayals and outings and the rapidity with which lives can be destroyed and reputations ruined based on politics, whim, and speculation. Chen also takes aim at China’s nouveau riche, as Ye’s boss Shen Liushu, a corporate oligarch, is a bossy patriarch who lords his financial dominance over his conspicuously consuming wife. Chen Ruoxi, the Internet news editor, (played by Yao Chen, in real life aka the Queen of weibo) mirrors Shen’s arrogant ruthlessness as she estimates page hits and site visits while disregarding the human cost of her calculations.
Though it bogs down a bit in the second half with some treacly stuff about finding meaning in life while you can etc, it’s a pretty lively little flick that shows a reinvigorated Chen Kaige in good form. With 2012’s pretty-but-stilted historical drama Sacrifice it seemed like Chen was stuck in a rut, but Caught In The Web shows that he’s still got something to say, and can say it in a brisk, contemporary style. His social critique is as trenchant as when he made Farewell, My Concubine (1993) and Yellow Earth (1984) and he’s adapted his filmmaking style to match the up-to-the-minute subject matter—the film’s rapid-fire editing suits the amped-up topic as each scene is cut with overlapping sound, jump cuts and truncated dialogue that echoes the hyperfueled activity of the internet.
Also opening this weekend in SF are two other new films by well-regarded Chinese directors. The Roxie Theater screens A Touch of Sin by Jia Zhangke (Platform; Still Life) which got a five-star review from the NY Times and which intertwines four stories of contemporary China in a bleak allegory about the disintegration of human interconnectedness. Playing at the AMC Metreon, Personal Tailor, probably the most commercial of the three films from China opening this week, is directed by Feng Xiaogang (If You Are The One; Back to 1942; Aftershock), which means that despite its seemingly lighthearted topic about a company that brings its clients’ fantasies to life, it’s likely full of veiled social critique. It also stars the brilliant Ge You (Let The Bullets Fly), which is always a plus.
Caught In The Web opens Friday, January 3, 2014
Landmark’s Opera Plaza Cinemas, 601 Van Ness, San Francisco (415)771-0183
Landmark’s Shattuck Cinemas, 2230 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley (510) 644-2992
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