Blush
With Wang Ji, Wang Zhiwen, He Saifei, Zgang Liwei, Wang Rouli, Song Xiuling, Xing Yangchun, Zhou Jianying, and Cao Lei.
Of course the relation of writing to visual representation isn’t the same in China as in Western cultures. Anyone who attended the Art Institute’s recent superb “Splendors of Imperial China” show, drawn from Taipei’s National Palace Museum, noticed that most Chinese landscape painting contains writing–and therefore belongs to the realm of literature and philosophy, as Hao Dazheng suggests, rather than constituting a “portrayal of reality” in the Western sense. But because the linear flow of both writing and camera movement suggests a narrative, the direction in which the eye travels inflects the voyage taken by a reader or spectator in following a story–even if this individual reading doesn’t necessarily correspond to something “seen by a particular person at a particular time.” (A few of the more interesting right-to-left crane shots in Blush begin high over a courtyard, viewing events below in a ground-floor apartment, before proceeding through a window into the second-story apartment–a journey no ordinary individual could take.)
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Much of the action in Blush is filmed in long shot, and when I asked Li whether she might have been influenced by similarly framed work of Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi from the 30s and early 40s, her response was blank puzzlement. After I discovered that my pronunciation of Mizoguchi made the name indecipherable, and she figured out whom I was talking about, her answer was simply no: she knew some of Mizoguchi’s work, but the visual sources of Blush were basically Chinese painting.
Lao Pu lives in a roomy house with his mother, and when she discovers Qiuyi’s background she tries to get her to leave. (Her initial ploy is an attempt to bribe Qiuyi with some of her old dresses.) When this doesn’t work, she exerts pressure on Pu, who finally relents and proposes to Qiuyi that he set her up in a love nest, a suggestion she angrily rejects, running off instead to take refuge in a Buddhist nunnery, where she’s forced to shave her head. By this time, however, Pu’s property is being confiscated by the government; he’s forced to move to a modest second-story flat and winds up working as an accountant.
To approach the question of what’s so Chinese about it, it’s worth returning to the example of Chinese painting–the multiple perspectives and the linear “narrative” flow evoked by Hao Dazheng. For throughout the richly textured story and shifting spaces of Blush we’re given the perspectives of three separate characters–each adding to rather than detracting from the perspectives of the other two–as well as a fourth perspective offered by the offscreen female narrator and a fifth offered by the camera’s vantage point, which is distinct from that of all the others. As in Chinese landscape paintings, there’s a continuity between interiors and exteriors, between human figures and their settings, between buildings and landscapes, between the abstract (notions such as “society,” “life,” and “the world”) and the mundane (such as the umbrella and the quilt). Moving from left to right, or from right to left, from courtyard to interior, from one floor and family to the next, from life to death, from prostitution to revolution, Li’s masterpiece proposes a way of reading the world as if it were literature or philosophy, a realm that transcends nature–a lengthy lateral tracking shot across history itself.
