《烈日灼心》

    Starring: Duan Yihong, Deng Chao, Guo Tao, Wang Luodan, Jackie Lui

    Director: Cao Baoping

    Cao Zhen

    caozhen0806@126.com

    CAO BAOPING’S latest production “The Dead End” is an engrossing and nicely textured crime movie based on the novel “Sunspot” by Xu Yigua, a law journalist from Xiamen, Fujian Province.

    The movie focuses on three friends: auxiliary policeman Xin Xiaofeng (Deng Chao), taxi driver Yang Zidao (Guo Tao) and angler Chen Bijue (Gao Hu), who are raising a 5-year-old orphan together in Xiamen. When watchful police officer Yi Guchun (Duan Yihong) becomes Xin’s new boss, the three friends’ lives change. Meanwhile, the unsolved murders of five people from several years before are haunting everyone.

    The movie is not a simple whodunit crime thriller nor is it a good versus bad flick. It focuses on individual pain. It conveys the notion that there is no absolute “good” or “evil” in the world; there is only pain and life is an experience in suffering pain. So the characters in the movie never feel at ease. Some try to be good and atone for their accidental but deadly mistakes. Some believe only death can relieve them. Even police officer Yi suffers pain. He is upright, but he helps his co-worker hide his embezzlement. While he tries to bring the murderers to justice, the closer he gets to the truth, the more difficult the case becomes for him, causing him personal pain.

    Thus, the movie’s Chinese name “烈日灼心,” literarily “the blazing sun burns hearts,” signifies that every character suffers pain on the inside.

    Cao’s movies encompass a broad range of stories, reflecting relentless life and reality in contemporary China. In his 2006 black comedy “Trouble Makers,” he used an agile, handheld camera to portray a collection of lowlifes in a lawless rural community. The director is renowned for plot twists and turns, keeping the tension high. His 2008 thriller “The Equation of Love and Death” was praised by Western critics as a stylish drama for his expertise at orchestrating frenzy.

    “The Dead End” won two awards at the Shanghai International Film Festival in June. Cao was named Best Director and Deng, Duan and Guo were all named Best Actors. The movie deserves these awards because the directing and acting are superb.

    Cao uses suspenseful conversations and many breakneck-paced scenes such as fighting on a beam between two skyscrapers to make “The Dead End” an effective thriller. The director takes his time depicting the execution of two prisoners, providing a close-up of the needle piercing their skin and focusing on a man’s face as he dies. Scenes like this are rare in Chinese cinema.

    Actors Deng and Duan breathe life into their roles, with riveting performances. Their roles develop a touching friendship in the movie, but they also hide secrets and are cautious with each other, so the on-screen chemistry between the two is phenomenal and compelling. The two actors generate empathy from the audience without any overt striving.

    The director isn’t entirely faithful to the book. “The Dead End” has a shocking twist at the end that is different from the original novel, but the movie’s ending is a disservice to the otherwise excellent plot. There’s also confusion about a very important supporting character, a weird property owner who monitors his tenants’ conversation with sophisticated equipment. The movie never addresses why he is doing it while the original novel gives a horrendous reason.

    A big surprise in the movie is a brief homosexual sex scene, a first for Chinese mainland screens. The scene, which shows two topless male characters passionately kissing, has shocked many moviegoers.

    Since China has no motion picture rating system, movies containing nudity, graphic sex or homosexual themes are censored or banned, such as “East Palace, West Palace” (1996), the first mainland movie with an explicitly homosexual theme. “Lan Yu,” a Hong Kong-mainland co-production filmed in Beijing in 2001, was also banned from mainland theaters for its full-frontal male nudity and explicit homosexual sex scenes.

    In recent years, the Chinese mainland has been loosening its guidelines on movies with vague homosexual content. Mainland movies “And the Spring Comes” (2007) and “Finding Mr. Right” (2013), which contain minor homosexual roles, and the British movie “The Imitation Game” (2014) with homosexuality as a sub-plot, all got the green light to be screened in mainland theaters.

    The gay kissing scene in “The Dead End” may raise hopes for moviegoers that the mainland is loosening its strict censorship, but the country should take steps to issue a rating system based on ages because there is nothing to prevent children from watching movies such as “The Dead End,” which contains too much crude violence and coarse language for young viewers.

    Well worth seeing, “The Dead End” has English subtitles and is now being screened in Shenzhen.