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Jonathan Rosenbaum on A TOUCH OF SIN:

"Over five years later, now that I’ve recently caught up with Jia’s episodic A Touch of Sin, I must confess that I find myself more than a little baffled by colleagues of mine who have praised these earlier films and now seem to find little difficulty in placing this semi-desperate sellout effort on the same plateau as his previous work. Despite the sincerity and urgency of the film’s political content, its reduction of potentially interesting characters to pop-movie stereotypes seems to be at least partially and grimly acknowledged (and autocritiqued) by Jia’s casting himself in a cameo as a customer at a sleazy upscale bordello. This is the only time I’ve felt disappointed or betrayed by any of his films."

I'd love to know what you members think of Rosenbaum's comments.

WOW. I'm a little baffled by some of the high praise too, especially when I thought some critics shared my reservations about the film, but calling it a betrayal is way too harsh. I wish I could respond in more detail because the film's already faded a bit in memory - I recall thinking that the segments got better as the film went along.

I don't know, you always get this kind of "fetch me the smelling salts" reaction when an 'obscure' auteur makes a film that's a little more accessible, and it's almost always utterly hyperbolic. I thought A Touch of Sin was a great film, extremely well-made (with Jia demonstrating a real faculty for the 'generic' material that was new to him) and actually a pretty logical development stylistically. I actually think The World represented a greater leap towards the mainstream for Jia at the time, and confusing either film for a commercial sellout is willfully myopic. There's plenty of aesthetic and political bite there, whether or not a couple of guns are fired during the course of the movie.

Also worth noting that this "sellout" effort has run into bigger censorship difficulties than any of Jia's films since going "aboveground," to the extent that the Chinese media has been officially instructed not to write about it. (This has led to some amusing circumlocutions during awards season—my favorite is the website that named the five nominees for the Golden Horse best picture award as "The Grandmaster, Ilo Ilo, Stray Dogs, Drug War, etc.")

Taking cheap shots at works produced by artists coping with (essentially) totalitarian circumstances is always really easy.

The Fanciful Norwegian wrote:Also worth noting that this "sellout" effort has run into bigger censorship difficulties than any of Jia's films since going "aboveground," to the extent that the Chinese media has been officially instructed not to write about it. (This has led to some amusing circumlocutions during awards season—my favorite is the website that named the five nominees for the Golden Horse best picture award as "The Grandmaster, Ilo Ilo, Stray Dogs, Drug War, etc.")

Another fun example: right now this is the front page of one of China's most popular film websites. The headline below Tony Leung reads "Film Comment announces yearly best-of; The Grandmaster makes the list." Click through to the actual article and you find that The Grandmaster is at #20 and A Touch of Sin is at...#5. There's no other reference to Jia's film in the actual article, while even Wang Bing's 'Til Madness Do Us Part gets a second mention for making the list of undistributed films. The user comments call them out on it, as they have every time a list like this appears (the same thing happened with the Sight and Sound and Cahiers lists). But of course it isn't up to the website, and they're lucky they weren't obliged to leave the #5 spot blank.

Late-period Jonathan Rosenbaum is not to be taken seriously, particularly on Chinese film. He sincerely thought (and wrote, in his Chicago Reader blurb) that Jia's Platform took place during the Cultural Revolution. When I emailed him about the blurb, I discovered that this wasn't, as I had hoped, a typo. After protesting he had it changed to "the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution." Given that Platform begins several years after the end of the Cultural Revolution and explicitly chronicles the enormous changes that Chinese culture underwent during the Deng Xiaoping period of economic reform, this is a little like writing that The Thin Red Line takes place in "the aftermath of the Great Depression."

Sorry for the temporary digression, but that quote about A Touch of Zin above made my blood boil. There are good reasons, I think, to object to Jia's film, but "selling out" (whether he means to Chinese authorities, Chinese moviegoers, Western critics, and/or Western art-house audiences) is decidedly not one of them.

Haven't got a chance to watch this latest shot by Jia Zhangke yet. Considering the reportedly profuse graphic depictions of violence in the film, it is not surprising that it's seeing some difficulty with the "inspection" authorities. There's not a rating system in China.

The "sellout" remark by J.R. might sound a bit harsh. But IMHO, a major factor in these "avant-garde" Chinese directors' critical "success" overseas has always been a half-conscious catering to the Western taste of cinema and imagination of China. This self-orientation may be a much greater hurdle to the artistic merit of their works than most kinds of "totalitarian" censorship.

In recent years, censorship has become a common excuse for the appalling level of Chinese cinema nowadays. The ironic fact is that Mao's era used to produce so many “red classics" that are way superior artistically and still tremendously popular with the mass audience. I seriously doubt if, 50 years from now, anyone would still remember any of Jia Zhangke's films or even the person himself, in the way people now fondly recall "Tunnel War", "Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy", or "Red Detachment of Women", and so on.

I guess the greatest totalitarianism is not any government but the human greed for money and vanity in our heart.

But IMHO, a major factor in these "avant-garde" Chinese directors' critical "success" overseas has always been a half-conscious catering to the Western taste of cinema and imagination of China

This is true in some cases—and it's probably a factor in the Western success (critical or commercial) of nearly every Asian film, whether the filmmakers intend it or not—but I don't think it gets to the heart of Jia's appeal. If anything, you could say that he caters to critics (and not just Western critics) by adopting a "minimalist" style then in favor among the festival crowd, a style that owes obvious debts to festival favorite Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Jia switches to this style with his second feature, Platform. Not that you can't see traces of it in Xiao Wu and his student shorts, but there seems to have been a conscious shift from one mode of "realism" to another. In other words, I don't think it's a matter of self-Orientalizing as you suggest, but of adapting a style then (and now) in critical fashion in "Asia" and "the West" (given the global nature of contemporary film criticism, I'm not sure you can parse those concepts so easily).

But I don't believe this amounts to a "sellout," unless you think everything designed to appeal to other people is guilty of selling out. I don't like that uncharitable phrase to begin with, redolent as it is of indie-rock authenticity wars. Also, the mastery of form and style that Jia exhibits in his films makes a lot of these concerns moot. (There are plenty of examples of "slow cinema" where I think, "This is just too easy," and wish the camera would budge just a little.) That's not to say there isn't room for criticisms, and I have many of my own. But I'll save those for later.

jonah.77 wrote:If anything, you could say that he caters to critics (and not just Western critics) by adopting a "minimalist" style then in favor among the festival crowd

Thought this too - surely the film is more than anything a departure away from the comfort zone of "contemporary contemplative cinema" or whatever you want to call it. In fact if someone's pandering to audiences here it's Rosenbaum, as that kind of opinionated grouchy writing is exactly what most readers like to gobble up instead of thought-out criticism. I do agree with him on the less well-developed characters in this film, but what do you expect in a portmanteau film such as this, as opposed to Jia's usual 2+ hours concentrating on a handful of people?

It's not a particularly violent film, certainly not profusely so, compared to what's constantly being played on festivals around the world - it has a few scenes of physical violence as opposed to practically none in Jia's previous work: probably what makes it difficult to swallow for Chinese authorities is that the violence is provoked by oppression. I'm really not intimately familiar with the state of the contemporary Chinese society, but I did feel that the themes of the film are quite universal and not in any way particular to China.

A lot of major Chinese directors since the Fifth Generation have been accused of self-orientalizing or pandering to Western tastes. I think you can make good arguments that Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige fall into this trap at times, particularly in later films. Ironically, that's when the two have become bona-fide successes--in China as well as abroad.

When people (or Chinese officials) accuse Jia of catering to Westerners, it's usually a matter of content rather than form. Mainly, Jia always shows the bad side of China (to expose my prejudices here--that's just another way of saying the side that the Chinese media/government doesn't like to talk about)--poverty, alienation, corruption, disrepair. It's an accusation that hit Xiao Wu hard and has followed Jia around since, popping up every time he releases a new film. While it's certainly true that the West prefers to consume images of a flawed or tragic China (hence the relative popularity of Cultural Revolution pictures and BANNED IN CHINA muckrakers), Jia doesn't wallow much in over-the-top miserabilia, and I'm always consistently amazed just how true-to-life his films feel. For example, there's an early scene in A Touch of Sin where Dahai is eating in a small restaurant with kitschy still-life paintings of food on the walls (ubiquitous in China's hole-in-the-walls) and for moment I thought I had eaten there myself. And a smart Chinese director catering to foreign audiences is not going to prominently include Chinese opera singing in his film (hell, I think even Farewell, My Concubine features less actual singing than A Touch of Sin) or consistently fill his films with local dialects.

That said, A Touch of Sin is not likely to persuade those concerned with China's image abroad. Since The World Jia has been making consistent efforts to expand the palette of his material, moving beyond the rural and working-class to include more of the urban and middle-class that is rapidly making more of Chinese society (particularly in 24 City and I Wish I Knew). But Sin is almost entirely consumed by concern for the lower class, and while it does explore other spaces of the upper classes in the 4th section (including a Tarrentinoesque self-deprecating cameo by Jia himself), the portrayal is decidedly negative. The violence is a problem with censorship, but so are the flagrant acknowledgments of China's rampant prostitution and Dahai's never-ending accusations of corruption.

I'm not sure all the 4 acts work perfectly, but this is still a great film out of Jia. The second segment is probably the biggest outlier, and while I didn't find it as satisfying as the rest (excepting its tour de force conclusion), I think I get what Jia was aiming at. Given the tons of references to Outlaws of the Marsh, I feel it's worth noting that that work presents a spectrum of 108 bandits that are all over the redemption scale. So while they include the justly wronged (like Lin Chong of the first opera segment) they also include murderers without much conscience. My favorite story in this vein is one where the bandits force a man to join them by throwing the child he's supposed to be protecting into the river while another member has a nice chat with him. So San'er fits in as part of that more morally dubious but often overlooked tradition of wuxia.

Ultimately, all these characters are united in purpose, like the Outlaws of the Marsh, but lack any place to gather or unite to affect any real sort of change.

I think your last sentence is spot-on, and a reading more or less directly endorsed by the film which includes a handful of references to The Water Margin and other wu xia literature--references that, understandably, most Western critics have missed. I do think several of Jia's films effectively demand either a Chinese audience or a Western audience willing to brush up on Chinese culture and history to be effectively understood. for example the way Platform handles the passing of time is very elliptical, but Chinese audiences would pick up on slogans, slang, snippets of songs, changes in dress, etc. to pinpoint what is taking place when. so much for pandering to Western audiences, or critics, or whatever Rosenbaum intended to suggest.

re. repeat's comment that

I do agree with [Rosenbaum] on the less well-developed characters in this film,

I would argue that none of Jia's films have what I would call "well-developed" characters. none of them are principally concerned with character psychology. this, too, is something of an art-film cliche since (at least) Antonioni and especially in the '00s when Jia became a big part of international festival cinema. granted, The World has sequences that are explicitly mentally subjective. but even in films like Unknown Pleasures or Xiao Wu, where we actually spend a considerable amount of time with very few main characters, they are hardly defined by their psychology. Platform, still my favorite of Jia's films, manages to create limpid, very satisfying little portraits of its characters, though mostly through their habits, gestures, body language, clothes, and facial expressions (which are not very revealing of internal psychology). you could probably call this approach "behaviorist," but I'm not convinced that Jia is all that interested in character or the individual as such, as opposed to things like milieu, landscape, and above all larger patterns of historical change.

indeed, IMO his films do not seek to inspire questions about character psychology-- e.g. the way that conventional narrative films do, or even in the way that Antonioni's or Edward Yang's have flagrant ellipses that almost force us to wonder about character motivation even if the movies refuse to supply answers. I find myself asking different sorts of questions after watching Jia's movies.

would be interested to hear others' thoughts on this.

I will be happy to offer some thoughts once I finally get to see this. (Really wish this could be soon).

jonah.77 wrote:would be interested to hear others' thoughts on this.

I think your points are well-taken, and put this way, there actually seems to be more detailed psychology in some of its character portraits in A Touch of Sin (I'm thinking of Tao Zhao's character in particular), but elsewhere there's even less, and there's a deliberate mystery about some characters' motivations. I get the sense that in many of Jia's films his characters are living hand to mouth, and tidy psychological arcs are a luxury they can't afford.

I appreciate the illumination of the wuxia references in the film. It's obvious from the pun in the film's title that there are conscious parallels Jia wants to draw.

...

jonah.77 wrote:I would argue that none of Jia's films have what I would call "well-developed" characters. none of them are principally concerned with character psychology... even in films like Unknown Pleasures or Xiao Wu, where we actually spend a considerable amount of time with very few main characters, they are hardly defined by their psychology.

You're absolutely right, that was bad choice of words from me: I was really just thinking of the huge difference in time spent with each character between the early films and this one, but that's obviously a very different thing from character development! Your point about Jia's films demanding an audience familiar with Chinese culture totally jibes with my experience - his films always leave me fascinated, partly mystified, and convinced that a wealth of things I've missed are waiting to be unearthed. I haven't found any of them entirely inaccessible without such information, but all of them certainly seem to have depths that I don't have access to.

This may sound silly, but I was surprised just how in tune with the rest of Jia's work this is. My impression based on reviews was that this would be a major outlier, but even the presentation of violence here seems reflective of concerns and aesthetic ticks present in his other works. It just so happens in this case his communication and class based themes are here to represent anger and frustration, I assume due in part to the '08 crash though I don't know how exactly China was affected, with all of it being channeled by characters familiar to his other films. We have immigrant issues, the restructuring of China's work culture as a result of open relations with the west, etc. with each of the four segments. For example the third segment, my favorite, seems to be where the title comes in and even to my ignorant eyes is clearly in parody of Hu's work (not just the obvious one) with a conclusion like a real world Wuxi, but a lot of that is preceded by and infused with a simple lowest class story of a woman just trying to survive in the modern world. Through that into Still Life or even his documentary Dong particularly with that conclusion and I doubt any one would bat an eye (here's where I feel like joking that the most shocking and disturbing violence is the off screen one that opens the fourth segment). Naturally this poses questions of growth of him as an artist and limitations and all of that, but to steal from Sculpting in Time that Jia is able to make a film so textually separate from anything else he's done and yet have it be nothing more then a Jia film highlights the talent and intelligence that went into its making better then a full change of form would have accomplished. Of course all of this comes from me having seen none of his pre-The World films thus leaving me with only mainstream Jia as a reference point.

I think Rosenbaum totally missed the point of the film. The movie, at least its English Title is a playful homage to Touch of Zen. It had to be fictional and glossy. 4 segments are supposedly based on stranger than fiction news articles that's been happening in China.

Q: Your films always have been reflections of rapidly changing Chinese society, but never really this explicit about death and violence. I wonder what made you to concentrate on that aspect in this film.

A: Because the violence is an issue in social reality in China that has been accumulating in the past 2-3 years in particular. I digest them via the social media- from microblogs and weibo(Chinese version of Twitter). I noticed that these events are very widely discussed and I wanted to portray them in my film.