Blind Shaft

"Blind Shaft" is a good/great film about two con men. One of the con men is more vicious than the other, and has lost all feelings for other human beings. The other less-vicious con man still has some pangs of conscience, but both will do whatever it takes to survive.

This is like a small "Goodfellas" in that the two crooks, and the mine bosses they work for, are corrupt, and have no qualms about criminally exploited those around them. They live in a world of crime, and act accordingly. The Chinese street scenes ring with authenticity, no Westerners are present, this the China that hundreds of millions of Chinese see every day - poor, impoverished, corrupt, desperate, where the Communist party has long since abandoned Communism, and Socialism is just an empty slogan.

Nevertheless, there are good, compassionate people in this cynical environment. This film is really about one man's "redemption", the less negative of the two con man, and his realization that his destructive path in life is wrong. I'm writing cryptically because I don't want to spoil what the con is, I recommend this film highly, and I think it will play just as well on the small screen as on the large. See it on the big screen or DVD, but just see it!

Jinming and Zhaoyang travel around illegal mines with marginalised, friendless individuals, people who won't be missed, killing them underground and faking a mine collapse, so they can collect the compensation. The scam works well till their youngest ever recruit, fresh-faced Yuan, starts to grow on his 'uncle' Jinming, leading Zgaoyang to make a fateful decision.

Yang Li fashions a gritty, realistic tale from naturalistic performance and uncompromising locations. Life in the mines seems so severe, so sapping, that there is a tinge of release around the untimely deaths of the victims. The camaraderie and ephemeral nature of life as an itinerant worker is shown in all its banal and brutal detail. Families exist at the end of a phone line. The banter crackles with humour. Women are bought and paid for. Drink, cigarettes and gambling fill out the days. Bosses are amoral misanthropes.

This picture certainly jars with the 'new China' currently feted in Sunday glossies and in-flight magazines. Strong plot, and with a social conscience, this is an interesting fusion of social realism and plot-driven film-making. Highly recommended.

Mesmerizing and stark. Yang Li's documentary background is reflected in the ultra realistic look and feel of the film. Powerful and no b.s. It reminded me of the best of U.S. films from the 1970's. One particular sequence recalled The Last Detail but with higher stakes. This should be an influential film, however, it probably won't get the exposure it deserves.

Two men befriend itinerant workers in order get them work in the mines posing as a relative... then they kill them and, as family, claim compensation.

After a successful score, the pair find a fresh-faced youth just come from the country and take him under their wing planning to start over again - but their new protégé is a genuine innocent, and their relationship shifts around him until it becomes clear that their plan won't run so smoothly this time around...

I've seen this described both as an art-house character drama and as a kind of noir thriller, and while neither description is wrong both ideas of the movie lack something. It's neither - it's just an excellent film.

If it's a character drama, it scores: all three central characters are brilliantly played and have the idiosyncratic, sometimes inconsistent feel of real people. You laugh with them and feel for them, even when sometimes you shouldn't.

If it's a noir it also scores: bleak, honed to a sharp point and without an ounce of fat on, it's a mesmeric film in which the viewer is compelled to keep watching... in spite of the inescapable feeling that it's not going to end happily.

On the other hand, it's visually a world apart from the majority of Chinese art movies. With no music to relieve the realism, it eschews sumptuous visuals in favour of a raw, documentary style which pays off from the first scene, impressing on the viewer the mundane nature of its characters and how chilling simple their plan is.

Unlike most noir flicks, it's not overtly a thriller. Events unfold at their own pace, without the careful buildup and the climactic peak of the traditional thriller, and the murder and crime are presented as a part of these men's lives rather than the central subject of the film.

The central subject of the film is people, and that's where this film's unique impact lies. Not a film noir and not an art film, this is just a fine film which also happens to be a work of art.

I just saw this at the Pan African Film Festival where it was curated in conjunction with Visual Communications in a cross-cultural viewing. Bravo for that foresight.

And bravo for selecting BLIND SHAFT. Is it a masterpiece? No. What it is is a very solid piece of film-making. In basketball terms, it isn't Magic Johnson, it's James Worthy.

Rather than go into the plot, which everyone seems wont to do on these boards, I think it's much more helpful to talk about films in terms of their elements. Plot you can get anywhere, such as Ebert.

The story is a simple morality tale. Nuff said. What's standout about this movie is the ACTING - some of the best, particularly by the youngster that plays the young boy. He is super. The two principles and extended cast are solid as well.

Which points toward director Li Yang who flexes assured muscles throughout. Nothing fancy - no super montages or MTV fancy shmancy technique. In fact, the lighting is uniformly flat throughout, with a decidedly blue cast to connote the frigid brisk air. That's it.

It's also marked by the absence of a soundtrack.

BLIND SHAFT is a return to film-making of a Bressonian order, but with actors, not "models" as Bresson called them. It is a simple tale, but told in such a straight-ahead honest manner, it stands in stark contrast to the contrived machinations of the Hollywood puke machine that spews out "packages" like clockwork.

See this movie if you want bare-knuckle, honest film-making. Skip it if you want Brett Ratner window dressing from Hollywood - it's not for you then.