Little Black Dress (2011)

Nothing else in this movie touched me especially so.

Probably because it didn’t seem particularly organic, a lack of effective music, haphazard scenes put together and actresses, who had excellent acting chops, but didn’t seem to have real chemistry between them to establish real camaraderie. 

But this scene. This scene ripped my heart to little pieces. 

Heaven knows how many times a warm lap, a soft touch on my head, a good cry, holding onto my mother’s legs has been the most comforting thing in the world.

黄晓明 《风声》

written, composed for the 2009 Mainland Chinese movie 《风声》/The Message

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Wow. It’s been a year or two since I watched this movie, and it still remains a large part of my memory. There are generally several factors that will induce me to “enjoy” or “like” a movie, and “Message” hit me in the gut in one of these very ones:

• heartwarming moments, love in any shape or form in the sweetest possible way
• gutwrenching pain, emotionally, physically, psychologically or otherwise

Clearly, I like my directionally opposing emotions. 

This movie came out and was one of the recommended pieces when I was taking my “popular media” class in China during my study abroad year. In recent years, there has been a popular surge in the change of the face of film media in Mainland China, wherein directors have been going through “generational” face-lifts through the aesthetics, scenery and film production end of things. Feng Xiaogang and Zhang Yimou are both filmmakers who come from the 3rd or 4th generation of filmmakers/directors in China (if I’m not mistaken), where much of the production focuses on quality shots, shiny special effects and clean-cut costume and set designs. The director of this particular movie, is cut of the same cheesecloth. 

In recent years, much of the products from Chinese film that I’ve appreciated most are the nitty gritty depictions of historical fiction/non-fiction. There’s the saying that goes that a story doesn’t resound with its audience when the writer did not actually live through that part of life themselves. And I’m personally of the opinion, that all the ‘modern-day’ dramas and movies that Mainland China has thus produced have mostly been… (in my opinion) fairly forgettable. Mostly due to the fact that China, I feel, has not yet fully found itself as a personable identity in the modern world. It is still heavily struggling with its own cultural identity on the mainstream scene. 

But what China is undeniably strong at, is knowing its own history. And ohh does China have history. In these series of movies, including 《十月围城》、《叶问》、《风声》, the background story comes from a painful, deep recess of Chinese history. Each dealing with the modern turn of the century in various regions of Eastern China. And being born an ABC, with an out-of-touch understanding of the pain and aggression and humiliation that the Chinese people underwent through a sudden naked exposure to the rest of world in the late 19th and early 20th century is an amazingly poignant subject to be touched upon. 

《风声》 is extremely harsh as a movie piece, with no regard for soft hearts and innocent souls. Violence is less gory as it is imaginably, tangibly painful and wrenching. The subjects toyed with are reminiscent of a visceral China whose past has never left, and continues to spur on the political agenda of the country. 

Watching the torture scenes were painful far beyond a simple physical sense. Much of the pain came from the anger risen from an emotional connection with ethnic and cultural calling. And even despite some extent of demonization of the other in the movie, it was not done so much so that one could necessarily develop an anger towards the target country as a result. 

And despite knowing the propagandist approach behind the purpose of this movie, I can’t help but cry every time I listen to this song. The beauty and strength of the people of the time despite the intense amount of uncertainty surrounding their lives is certainly palpably visible throughout the entire film. And gritty though the plot and content may be, the ultimate message for the film really is beautiful and touching in ways that a fluffy lightweight modern-day movie could never do to depict China in all its complexities.

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