Um Toque de Pecado

This is a Chinese film written and directed by Jia Zhangke. There are four stories about four characters in modern China. They each face the corrupted modern world with violence. Jia based each story on a real event ripped from the headlines.

The most compelling one has to be Dahai. It's the performance of Wu Jiang. There is a real power in his presence. I would prefer the whole movie staying with him. It's not as simple as rooting for him. Quite frankly, it's hard to root for the guy after he shoots a kid. It reminds me of Michael Douglas in Falling Down. I had a hard time staying with the other stories. I kept waiting to reconnect with the Dahai story. I appreciate the idea of an anthology film. It's often the case that one stands out among the crowd. I always pine for more from one over the others.

After some moments of silence, the master of the sixth generation of Chinese filmmakers, Jia Zhangke returns with his newest feature "A Touch of Sin" (2013) which might just be his darkest work to date. It's an intriguing film of sheer brilliance told through the complexity of several, loosely connected stories about people in agony. While some fans of the director may be disappointed by the lack of clairvoyant lyric beauty, characteristic for example for "Still Life" (2006), others may find the narrative ambiguity and incoherence rather enriching.

The film begins with an enigmatic scene at a deserted rural highway where a truck carrying tomatoes has fallen over. A cold sense of brutality breathes in the air. Soon the first characters are introduced and we learn that, in the same way as in "Still Life", "A Touch of Sin" is structured from different stories with different human fates. In brief, it tells the story of four random acts of violence in today's society.

Although the stories lack obvious connection, they all share a few essential elements. First of all, they all escalate to an outburst of violence. Second, all of them are tales of social rootlessness and existential alienation. The latter remark is congruous with the fact that in all of Zhangke's films the general aspect meets the particular in a poignant fashion of chill and solitude. Individuals live in their personal prisons while the modernization of the society brings nothing but empty freedom. In other words, they live in spaces that are both private and public where they feel utterly detached. No one belongs anywhere in the Zhangke universe.

Due to the complexity of several stories, the film also includes more than one central milieu. However, this seemingly arbitrary set of different settings of hotels and a coal miners' town do tell us about veritably similar subjects. All the spaces are haunted by the same problems. Such conflict of ambiguity and coherence should not frighten the spectator. Since instead of a straight-forward narrative with clear character delineation, Zhangke offers us a fascinatingly cynical cross-section of the contemporary Chinese society which is, on the one hand, characterized by economic boom to whose technological wonderland an individual may vanish, and, on the other, the tormenting but also comforting legacy of Mao.

Modern Chinese way of life appears to Zhangke as something diverse -- as something that is in a constant state of change. Like in his previous features, Zhangke once again focuses on the transforming reality, the current flow, and its consequences on the individuals. Although this was already done to an extent in "Still Life" through the complexity of two overlapping stories, it also cast hope in humanity, whereas "A Touch of Sin" is far more pessimistic.

Once again Zhangke's aesthetics of cinema is characterized by the elements of silence and emptiness in the images of loneliness and alienation. It is as though everything had died. Only violence is portrayed passionately, all the rest is understated. The violence in "A Touch of Sin" is raw and brutal, but essentially stripped. Above all, violence appears as a melancholic undertone of some kind which reveals the realities of the society.

Even if the opaque and complex narrative of "A Touch of Sin" left the viewer speechless and unable to describe what he or she had just seen, there is always something profound to admire in Zhangke's cinema. In his films there is always that certain mood which is quite difficult to be put in words. In brief, it is a mood of emptiness, but also of utter richness.

One additional star for the topic that few has tried to film.

In about ten or twenty years, these 120 minutes of social depicting will be one of the very rare and precious visual stories for people to understand and entertain what is going on in the first ten years of the 21st century China. It offers a prospective with some interesting details that makes sense to the westerners or maybe its fellow countrymen in the future. But it doesn't really add up for the people living in China nowadays, or at least, the details are not enough.

Stories are too short that they can barely touch the real psychology that the Chinese laborers are having today. I'm not sure whether it is something that the director fails to do or he is not allowed to do. For example, there are lots of complexities existing between a complaining Shanxi miner and a mad murderer. Throughout the first story, the only real attempt Dahai, who has learned the laws and has close relatives living in the city, has made to disclose the corruption is a mail letter without a specific address. This is far away from the countless efforts that a Chinese miner would make before he explode himself with the illegal riches. To me, the efforts, the struggles, and the final desperate in Dahai's mind are the most interesting parts of the story. However, nothing really happens in the movie. The result is that, Dahai seems more like a legendary cowboy coming from a classic American western movie than a struggling Chinese worker who has relatives to care about.

It touches the social issues we are all witnessing in China today, it is entertaining and somewhat heroic, but it fails to restore the story into reality, let alone into a provoking level.

As always with portmanteau films, I found the quality of these four tales (or tellings) varies quite a lot, as does one's sympathy or empathy for the characters. As such, as others have commented, I thought that the rest of the film did not match up to the first quarter. However, the other three parts were not *bad*, and for me added to the overall tone of societal bleakness. I've made brief visits to China but would in no way say that qualifies me to judge how "realistic" a picture this is, despite the factual bases of the component stories. However, as we increasingly observe and debate the effect of China's actions on the wider global stage, this film perhaps provides helpful context, if this is the domestic backdrop...

The first minute of this film is better than entire acclaimed English-speaking movies of the year I'm watching it; 2020. But the film is ultimately disappointing.

Every movie director can take nice pictures, but this is a film of not only stunning visuals but stunning visuals time and again imbued with meaning in relation to society and environment.

The film is actually several separate short stories. Short stories can be perfect ideas uncorrupted by the extrapolation necessary for full-length films. But these short films reveal the weakness in lack of depth usually associated with the short film form: the limited time in which, with depth, to tell a tale.

Each of the main characters are victims of their situation, exploited by others in positions of authority in a society built this way. The users are not seen as such by the general mass of the people, who the director shows as dumb animals, most clearly in a scene with a mistreated animal in relation to the scene that it follows.

Though the short films are fleshed-out snapshots, they are snapshots all the same, wasting the promise of meaning imbued in single images. But the great failing is the lack of resolution to each story. A fatuous comeuppance is stuck on almost all as the director takes the easy way out.

These dim-witted "resolutions" are as if these days to end a film this way is more than acceptable, it is acclaimed. It is too easy to simply give up and do a Tarantino. The stories haven't quite lived up to their potential and then are given up on.

Still, despite its flaws, what is good about the film shows a great filmmaker at work.