Han jia

If you see Li Hongqi's film, Winter Vacation, please come armed with lots of patience. It's not a bore, but you need to wait for things to develop. The screening I was in had lots of people leaving, they couldn't handle such waiting. Because, at its core, Winter Vacation is about nothing.

In a small factory town in northern China, school is out for winter vacation. The problem is there's not a whole lot to do. But, like in Seinfeld, 'doing nothing' is perfect comedic territory.

Chubby babies badmouth their elders and go on the run. Parka-clad adolescents sit around on abandoned sofas in the deep freeze discussing the ins and outs of their sex lives. One family's only piece of sort of formal attire goes missing and emerges re-woven into something else altogether. Doesn't sound like much, but just trust that it's hilarious.

The cinematography here is quite spectacular. Each crumbling Soviet-style housing block and non-descript path is given a deep, saturated treatment. The end result like the best kind of urban decay photography; sometimes the action is almost a bit of an afterthought.

Embodies its themes of boredom, sparseness and a hint of vague, almost apathetic existential crisis. Incredibly difficult to focus on with a 10 or 15 second gap between each line of dialogue.

I don't know what to make of the directing style. Sometimes it seems like it's reaching for one thing, but comes off as untrained performers awkwardly respond to stilted direction. A generous, but maybe accurate reading is that the characters are just going through the motions with a deathly apathy. The final scene kind of feels like a punchline. Like it's an hour and a half long joke. Maybe it is. Maybe the dialogue is better in its native Mandarin.

Cinematography and style is pretty great. Almost no diegetic sound nor visual contradicts the soviet staleness established in the very first soon. Music helps relieve the boredom, but barely.

...one of the characters asks in this film, when he wakes to find his friends stand around staring at him in his bedroom, and the answer may be the same as why we watch the film- there's nothing else to do. Eventually we laugh, because the only alternative is to weep.

Set on the last days of the school's winter holidays, centring on a bunch of adolescents and moving out to their families, this film is like Hongqi's other films, only more so, and in colour. This time the camera stares blankly as ever and never moves at all and most of the cast are just as motionless and indifferent. "How to be a useful member of society" the English teacher scrawls on a blackboard at the end of the film (the biology teacher- who's forgotten to take his medication- has just been telling the children that everything they're told at school is lies and delusions, but he was in the wrong classroom) and the children stare and fidget blankly while a punk song with all the energy none of the characters shows plays loud enough to hurt the ears and eventually the film ends in a blank screen. Just about the only character to show any curiosity- the four or five your old Zhou Zhangxin, "the most pitiful child I know", his playmate says- is persistently told to "Be quiet or your uncle will kick your butt", not that there's any sign his uncle- who is the teenager who asked "Why are you looking at me?"- would bother to do any such thing. We aren't surprised that Zhou Zhangxin wants to be an orphan when he grows up and eventually runs away because he can't wait. Where all the other characters slouch indifferently- even when they are bullying or being bullied, Zhou Zhangxin is striding determinedly into his future when last we see him. How far he will get is another question.