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Wang (left) and Li conspire.
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Blind Shaft
Runs Fri., March 26–Thurs., April 1, at Varsity
Imagine a society in which greedy capitalists are limited only by the amount of bribe they can afford to pay corrupt officials. Envision no EPA, OSHA, or FDA; no Medicare or Medicaid; no Social Security or workers' comp; no minimum wage or sick days. You work or you die. You work until you die. Is this our future under Dubya? No it's present-day China, at least according to this bluntly powerful moral fable, in which coal is more valuable than human life.
"Now only fucking money matters," says Tang (Wang Shuangbao), the older and more cynical of two grifters with a well-practiced scheme for profiting from post-Communist China's moral/economic anarchy. With his younger cohort, Song (Li Yixiang), they blackmail shady businesses willing to pay hush money to conceal industrial accidents from the authorities (who would otherwise demand an even bigger payout). Sample M.O.: Befriend some unsuspecting rube fresh off the bus from an impoverished village; lure him with the prospect of a well-paying job at a mine; kill him with a pickax to the skull; claim the death was caused by a cave-in; then collect the cash. (Each life is valued at about $4,000.) Says one mine owner before handing over the loot, "Burn the corpse and get out of here."
Blind Shaft is about as subtle as that pickax to the skull. Shot inside real mines (meaning some very, very dark cinematography), it has a somewhat clunky, utilitarian feel to its craft, plotting, and characterization: Tang is ruthless, while Song is sensitive and softer. One of their marks, Yuan (Wang Baoqiang), turns out to be a sweetly trusting and innocent 16-year-old hick who's coached to call Song "uncle." Soon Song feels himself to be exactly that. He helps studious Yuan to lose his cherry in the obligatory brothel-deflowering scene. He stalls and barters with Tang to forestall Yuan's death. Finally, as the deadline nears on their latest con, he offers himself in Yuan's place.
In an earlier era of capitalism, like that of Upton Sinclair and The Jungle, director Li Yang's debut feature might be seen as a muckraking call to arms, a progressive manifesto, or perhaps just a 60 Minutes exposé. Today, we call it an art film, perhaps being so unaccustomed to viewing the brutal underpinnings of the system. No documentary (though news reports would tend to support its verisimilitude), Blind Shaft dramatizes the flip side of globalization—an economy in wrenching transition from farms and collectives to smokestacks and cell phones. The doomed miners here resemble the workers in a Sebastião Salgado photo, and the ravaged, poisoned environment in which they toil resembles those chronicled by Canadian landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky (such images are typically taken in developing nations).
The movie shows us labor conditions so perilous that murder and employment are almost interchangeable terms. However, perhaps to pass government censors, it spares the authorities direct criticism, and its ending is rather too morally pat and predictable. (Or perhaps you could call it Confucian in its justice.) As much as Blind Shaft is about China's problems, it's not "foreign," because the half-Communist, half-capitalist system it depicts is like some dark doppelgänger of our own. Somehow we're implicated, too—this is our history being played out again, only in Mandarin. When shy, virginal Yuan steals a peek at Western pinups, with their Brobdingnagian boob jobs and bottle-blond hair, their sheer abundance seems more pornographic than their poses. The kid's curiosity is touching, even while his desire betokens greater problems ahead. China is much larger than the U.S., and it will eventually be richer in sheer economic might. It will consume more, spend more, pollute more, kill more—whether by design or neglect. As we see in Blind Shaft, both those tendencies are equally fatal. (NR) BRIAN MILLER
Intermission
Opens Fri., March 26, at Metro and Uptown
This diverting but minor Irish comic ensemble piece opens with a speech by Colin Farrell that shows why the bad-boy thespian was snapped up so fast by Hollywood. "Love's not something you can plan for, is it?" he asks, beginning a breakup-induced roundelay of unplanned mishaps and broken hearts with ample charisma (and some nifty handling of a shovel). Redeeming himself nicely for S.W.A.T., Farrell plays a petty hooligan on a crime spree who ends up part of an inept bank-robbery scheme that also includes a lovelorn grocery-store peon (28 Days Later's Cillian Murphy) and the woman he disastrously dumps (Trainspotting's Kelly Macdonald, worth more than any amount found in the safe). The film jumps around briskly among its various plot strands, then sews them up neatly in a satisfying, if predictable, manner.
Along the way, we meet Murphy's sad-sack co-worker, who's so lonely that he cries while masturbating; Macdonald's sister, who refuses to wax her she-'stache "as a sign of mourning" for a past trauma; and a hard-faced little urchin with a knack for tossing rocks through car windows, causing several serious accidents. Recognizable to American viewers, Colm Meaney plays a self-styled vigilante cop who wants to star on a reality TV program. Naturally, his mean streak leads him into conflict with Farrell (who punches several women with untroubled gusto—he's an equal-opportunity ruffian). Then there's a guy who gets knocked out by a can of peas, my favorite moment in the film.
