Film - Jonathan Romney on the mysteriously deradicalised director of Raise the Red Lantern
The world over, film-makers bemoan their lot - having to suffer heavy-handed producers, being misunderstood by critics, not getting final cut. All due respect, but most of them don't know they're born: they should try working in China. There, film-makers have to worry about a government that has its own ideas about the national images that China should export. In the late Eighties and early Nineties, a group of film-makers - the so-called "Fifth Generation" directors, including Chen Kaige and his former cine- matographer Zhang Yimou - put mainland Chinese cinema back on the world map, but not always with official blessing.
Zhang's lush 1920s dramas Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern proved eminently exportable, providing an international art-house icon in his glamorous lead actress Gong Li. But both films were initially banned in China; the government tends not to explain its reasons, but among them were certainly the films' heated, if demure, sexual content, their images of personal rebellion and what could be construed as a depiction of a former "primitive" China (the film minister at the time complained of seeing "too many bandits, eunuchs, prostitutes and spies" on screen).
Zhang subsequently made The Story of Qiu Ju, a more sober exercise in present-day realism, only to be accused by some critics of cynically appeasing the government. But his problems didn't stop there - he has repeatedly been prevented from attending international festivals and, last year, he pulled two films from Cannes, claiming that he was tired of the west reading his films as either political statements or apologies for the government. Whatever prompted his complaint, one can see his point: it's tough enough to cope with official pressures without worrying about approval from the Croisette crowds.
Zhang's most recent British release suggests that this is a debilitating quandary. Not One Less is even more back-to-basics than Qiu Ju - a low-key provincial tale with a non- professional cast, worlds away from the opulently staged passions of his early work. It's a benign vignette about a gauche 13-year-old girl, Wei Minzhi, who is drafted as a substitute teacher in a village school. Only two years older than her charges, she's barely up to the job: asked what she knows, she haltingly recites two lines of a song, then clams up. She's useless at discipline, preferring to hide at the back of the school shack, which doubles as accommodation for her and several pupils. Then the class rebel, a boisterously grinning lad called Zhang Huike, escapes to the city looking for work to pay his mother's debts. In a sudden fit of responsibility, Wei Minzhi decides to go to retrieve him.
However authentically Chinese it feels, Not One Less has the same shape as many school stories in western cinema, from To Sir with Love to Dangerous Minds: the teacher and her pupils are redeemed by learning to face a common challenge. Wei Minzhi's first problem is to raise the bus fare to town, so she takes the children to earn cash at the local brickworks. Soon, they're working out how many bricks they must shift to bring the boy back. The moral: a problem shared can provide even the most inexperienced teacher with ample material for a maths class.
The film's first half has a spontaneous drive which comes largely from Zhang's casting of non-professionals in parts so close to life that they effectively play themselves. The mayor really is a village mayor; Wei Minzhi really is a gauche, blushing, grouchy- looking 13-year-old called Wei Minzhi. When her pupils crowd into the classroom for their first gawp at her, or bicker behind her back, the film has a raw, anarchic spontaneity that can't be faked.
Then things turn mawkish, to an excruciatingly soapy flute theme. Wei Minzhi spends the night at the city bus station, eking out her precious ink to write handbills. She waits a day outside the TV centre after the concierge refuses to help her. Eventually, the station manager (a station manager in real life) ticks off the jobsworth (in reality, a ticket-office clerk), who replies: "I just follow the rules." As in Qiu Ju, minor officials may be pedantic or abusive, but those up top are magnanimous enough to help the people directly. In the end, a helpful Esther Rantzen-style TV host (a real-life TV presenter) not only reunites teacher and pupil, but also publicises the fate of underfunded village schools and brings the class a welcome windfall of coloured chalk.
A loose, pithy comedy carved out of the everyday becomes a crude public service announcement, critical of a pressing social problem, but expressing confidence in authority to correct matters. Not One Less feels all the more awkward considering a parallel that is especially visible in the first half: Zhang has claimed the influence of Iranian film- makers, notably Abbas Kiarostami, as an object lesson in achieving wonders despite restrictive conditions. But compared to the complex and open-ended miniatures achieved by Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon) or Makhmalbaf pere et fille (A Moment of Innocence, The Apple), Zhang's film looks schematic and faux-naive.
Mainland Chinese cinema is moving on. The most urgent, lucid voices belong to younger, independent directors such as Wang Xiaoshuai (The Days) and Jia Zhangke (Xiao Wu), often working outside state-approved structures, even resorting to pseudonyms if necessary.
Meanwhile, Chen Kaige, abandoning his increasingly overblown historical epics, recently announced, of all things, an erotic thriller set in London. And Zhang, whatever restraints he faces, appears to have lost his way. As for his erstwhile superstar Gong Li, she has become one of the international faces of L'Oreal, and good for her - because she's worth it.
Not One Less (U) is released nationwide on 23 June
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