UNDER THE LIGHT
Jianrupanshi (Solid As a Rock)
2023
Directed by Zhang Yimou
Written by Chen Yu
Almost halfway through his eighth decade on Earth, Zhang Yimou has not slowed down—since turning 70 in 2020, he's released six films—but he could be accused of having gotten a little creatively exhausted, and readier to just churn any given movie out. I've certainly made such accusations here, and I would describe the films on either side of today's subject as, indeed, a little bit lazily-made—2023's Full River Red in a very stultifying way, 2024's Article 20 in a more "sure, that works" way, though Article 20 is more lazily-made than I thought at the time when I said it was like three episodes of a TV show, because now I know that Zhang restages two scenes nearly verbatim from his immediately-preceding movie. (One of which indicates, along with a fair number of other fillips from his 20s career, that he's been playing a huge catch-up game with American stuff from the 21st century; in this case, the whole "startle the fuck out of the audience with a random car impact" trope that was a big thing in, as I recall, the late 10s.) But Zhang's second film of 2023—called Under the Light in English for reasons we will be able to guess at immediately, and Solid As a Rock in Chinese for more obscure, presumably thematic ones—at least suggests where his energies were going. I missed it at the time (it supposedly got an American release, and Pittsburgh has tended to get the bigger-deal Chinese films, but I did not know it existed), and I think it would've changed my tenor a little on Article 20. I would've groused less about its (predominantly) super-duper normal digital photography, if I knew it was in conversation with Zhang's previous movie as a sort of (purely thematic) diptych that did the Law & Order thing ("the police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders") across two whole separate two hour-plus films, and which to some degree treated with, respectively, "the night of the Chinese city" and its "day." Because Under the Light has got some crazy cinematography, courtesy Luo Pan along with reshoots from Zhang's longtime collaborator, Zhao Xiaoding (and I wouldn't presume to tell you where the seams were, as it's very aesthetically cohesive; we can discuss the troubling mystery of those reshoots later). It would not have put to rest my more substantive complaints about Article 20, for, like Article 20, Under the Light is edited like complete ass. I would probably say that editor Li Yongyi is even having a little more trouble with Zhang's footage than he did on Article 20.*
Since I'm going to have some modestly gushing things to say about Under the Light, that I imagine could still scan as backhanded, it's best to get the pure poison out first: edited like ass, and, relatedly, blocked like ass, or kind of barely blocked at all, and scenes are frequently staged in something you might describe as "non-staging" because it's bouncing all over the place with various editing rule violations to aggregate "cinema" out of a whole shitload of lonely singles, all done inside of this cumbersomely wide and rather bizarre 2.66:1 frame, an aspect ratio (and an arbitrarily selected one, as it's a digital film, and I don't even think it's inherent to the lensing) that I can sort of see the purpose of, as it likely played better in a movie theater set up for it if such things do still exist in China, but which works to the benefit of Under the Light rarely, and generally works to its detriment. This cinematography is so... let's say "interesting," though I am happy to let us already get as far as overwhelming, that I am sort of annoyed that the affective experience I think it could have provided under a more sensible editing (and shooting) strategy was denied to us. This could have been, if maybe not a masterpiece, then a real triumph for Zhang in his late career, if the actual manufacture of the film weren't "nearly the entire film is just coverage from three or four handheld cameras operating all at once, thrown into a digital editing program set on 'puree,'" which was also the problem in Article 20, though there's more reason for its enervating rhythms there; when Article 20 starts quick-cutting, it's because arguments are getting heated, and it's as much a function of the script there that "heated arguments" are basically half that movie. Here it's just because we have to check in, via close-up, with every single fucking person in a scene, apparently. I am perhaps being a skosh unfair, because Under the Light is maybe not as badly put-together as I'm suggesting all the way through: the really assaultive stuff, where the geography of just, like, ordinary rooms can be difficult to discern, settles down to a mere overenthusiastic cutting, and merely noticeable absence of camera movement.
I think Zhang thinks this is just how youth-oriented technology-inflected thrillers are supposed to be, and it's a pity because Zhang can make really solid thrillers (hell, as late as 2022, he and his daughter made Snipers), but this is his Tony Scott or Michael Mann thriller. Or at least those are the names I see Westerners drop: I think Scott checks out, to some degree, and might even be an influence; Mann would never construct something this way and would be too interested in soaking in the atmospheric properties of that cinematography; and I think the actual precursor is a movie of Zhang's own anyway. I wish it were built differently, but we have the movie we have, which—curiously—is not, actually, the movie Zhang initially made: there's a 147 minute director's cut that will likely never see (hm) the light, given that all the speculation (I think it's quite reasonable speculation) is that this was sent back for those aforementioned reshoots at the party's behest. Unlike with 2020's One Second, where the potential for offense seems so nebulous ("the Cultural Revolution sure was a thing that happened, such as it informs this film's plot but not very much of its story") that I don't personally believe that that film was censored, Under the Light could actually ruffle feathers, being a contemporaneously-set film about government corruption. (Now, it's much more about the personal vendetta between a corrupt government official and a corrupt businessman, and official corruption is just how they pursue that vendetta, because screenwriter Chen Yu found that a more enjoyable story, and I won't gainsay that decision.) It ends with an American Graffiti gambit that made me briefly wonder if this actually was inspired by some manner of true story, in how unnecessarily detailed it is, but it basically makes Hays Code-like promises of order being restored—and, of course, while saying whether a movie has a "happy" ending or not might still constitute a spoiler, at this point in history, mentioning that a Chinese movie doesn't explicitly call into question government policy would not be. The sequence also includes a triumphal PSA about a 2022 anti-organized crime bill.
In any case, maybe the 147 minute cut (the publicly-available one is 127), which would seem to be a different version of the story in addition to being a merely longer one, is less jumbled and sloppy, and perhaps its editing is less crummy. Perhaps it is also more hard-hitting, though Under the Light as constituted isn't all that soft, politically. But as I've been banging on about formalism for a good while now without really describing the movie, I suppose I should summarize it, even if nothing it's doing takes it much out of the generic pigeonhole I've already put it in. So: Su Jianming (Lei Jiayin) is a techie in the police force (I believe the movie is set where it's shot, Chongqing, because given the "city is a character!" complexion of this movie I cannot for a moment imagine any Chinese audience possibly accepting it being set anywhere else). Jianming is a relatively low-level dude, though his (adoptive) father Zheng Gang (Zhang Guoli) is a very highly-placed cop in the hierarchy, a "director," though I cannot tell you precisely what that means. Things kick off with a hostage situation that Jianming determines was actually an attempt to assassinate his father; he begins to suspect that a wealthy industrialist, Li Zhitian (Yu Hewei), is behind it—he gets a certain sense of the billionaire's gangster bona fides during a dinner, the entire purpose of which seems to be to have Jianming watch as Li cajoles a disfavored subordinate to reach into a roiling hotpot to retrieve a cellphone containing compromising video files—and there is certainly some ancient animosity between he and Jianming's father, which shall forthwith escalate, and Li might be the more vulnerable party thanks to his daughter (Tong Chen) and not-entirely-trustworthy son-in-law/successor (Sun Zizhou). Jianming and his techie comrades Li Huilin (Zhou Dongyu) and Sun Heyang (Xu Zili), the former of whom is his ex-girlfriend, track the traces and do all that investigative procedural stuff, but the secrets Jianming uncovers are more personal than he ever expected.
Like I said, it's generic, with not all that much beyond "being generic" to point to: even the personal nature of the case isn't really explored with the melodramatic fullness you'd think it would be (honestly, I think it's more symbolic), at least not for Jianming (and this includes having his ex investigate with him); it does get explored as melodrama for the older cohort, and it's pretty decent stuff (playing Jianming's mom, Joan Chen gets in on the act) though it's not a plot that's necessarily playing very fair; I think there's a little something, left entirely to the visuals, about what a trio of nerds our three main cops are, insofar as Lei spends the whole movie with a bad haircut (he looks nothing like on the poster) and most of it with bad posture, and the other two are pretty short, even stood against Lei (Zhou always looks shorter than she even is**, and is visibly delicate, almost to the point of miscasting for any kind of cop, even a techie), and they're all bespectacled, so the result is three Velmas wandering around Chongqing ultimately getting into some pretty high-impact scrapes. It's not unpleasurable: the investigation itself is "effective" mystery mainly to the extent the movie is sort of hard to follow, but thrillers can kind of get away with that, and I'm sure it's possible that everything does add up in the end. Yu, meanwhile, is putting on an affirmatively good performance for his side of the antagonism. That's true, again, of all the older cohort, but Li offers the most for any actor to do here, with his slick presentation and unconcealed malignity being counterweighted by Yu providing Li such a chummy, avuncular attitude, even before the way he relates to his family (which is a much bigger proportion of this cast of characters than you'd initially assume, and as noted I'm not sure this movie is "fair") gives him an entirely different set of emotions and motivations to play. And then, just to sort of baffle you, we get a mid-credits sequence—two, really—of astonishing humanism, and I am not remotely sure it's humanism that's been earned by the movie, though I liked how both of them jut up so uncomfortably against what's supposed to just be a cop thriller.
But even if sometimes its plot is neat, and sometimes its characters might engage you, this isn't an interesting movie because of its plot or its characters, so I'm going to stop talking about that, and talk about what I started talking about at the outset: this movie looks fucking nuts. It is already slamming it right into your eyeballs during the bombing sequence that begins the movie, with wherever this is in Chongqing (and I think I've seen a photo of it, and it is not lit like this) presented as the most rainbow-barf vision of "the urban night" imaginable, though you only cannot imagine it because you haven't seen the rest of Under the Light yet. I'm not sure, however, that the movie doesn't only begin to train you how to watch it until the subsequent daytime scenes, which are also color balanced in ways that an alien might do were they unfamiliar with what humans, their domestic spaces, and their sun looked like. And then we get more nighttime, with the one proper use of the 2.66:1 ratio (even if the actors are framed horribly inside it) with tourist boats passing on the Yangtze River, just these blaring blobs of neon color sliding in and out of a blurry background, in conjunction with the blaring blobs of neon color in the foreground. The film will do this all over; it doesn't need party boats for an excuse (though Huilin lives on an apartment boat for some barely-plausible reason, and the "actual movie reason" is pretty transparent).
Let us be real: this movie looks hideous. Not a thing in it looks normal, including every shot of a human face; a great deal of it fails to look real, and there are dozens of scenes that I am sure are real and involve real shining daytime cityscapes seen from windows, or real shots of garishly-decorated nighttime shots of bridges, but look like CGI, or even rear projection, and the one thing that I think probably is CGI, a freakshow pink train passing the windows of the train we're in and basically making the imagery unparsable for a while, is not CGI in such a way that, in this context, you would ever be able to know for sure. (The pursuit throughout one of those shiny sky city community buildings that you sometimes find in China happens during the daytime, and it's so shiny, and tilted with so much yellows, that it looks like a model that somehow has people wandering all over it.) And let's not leave aside some pretty well-built individual sequences where Zhang's other skills beyond "color design" actually wake up, though "color design" is important to them: a very well-done home invasion, and a murder undertaken in piss-yellow lighting conditions and inside a dehumanizing hazmat suit that is sickeningly cold from any angle you'd like to consider it. (Nor do I want to say the whole thing is chaos, though chaos reigns; there are, from time to time, some very intentional "actual lighting set-ups," despite the shooting style being employed for the majority of the footage.) All told, though, it's a pretty grand idea, to be expressed only somewhat by narrative and mostly by form, that this society is affluent, but ugly, and the people responsible for that ugliness have only gussied it up with so much candy-colored tastelessness that the light itself is blotting out the evidence of their crimes, and the light itself is ugly, and so everything is this constant artificial glare, while even the people it illuminates are either desperately trying to achieve some sort of authentic reality against a world that wants them to remain fake—people like Jianming—or they're rotted out entirely and hiding behind masks lit by gruesome LEDs and rendered in the world's most nauseating color grading and contrast levels, with blow-out being a constant companion, so that it only even registers as "blow-out" anymore when it confounds the compression algorithm and manifests as something basically equivalent to Goddamn macroblocking.
So what I was thinking about was not Scott or Mann or anybody else: I was thinking about the last time Zhang Yimou made a movie about his society crushing people into paste and moving on as if nothing had happened, likewise full of the gaudiest and most revolting prismatic colors that simultaneously concealed and announced the void at the heart of it, that being 2006's Curse of the Golden Flower, a movie "set in" medieval China and only not "about" the China of the previous several years because the CCP's censors used to be literalist and dumb and because Zhang has never been stupid enough (or at least not in a long while) to just say it aloud. This is about China some decades down the line, and there is room for more optimism, whether Zhang had that optimism foisted upon him or not; but it's nice to see that, in between all his "let's invade Taiwan!" jingoistic movies, and the more likeably patriotic legal procedural of Article 20, he's still engaging with the same ideas he always was even back when "Fifth Generation Cinema" meant something fraught. And it's an intelligent update, to boot: with modern China's frankly unappealing urban spaces to take advantage of, this kind of is how you make a technology-adjacent thriller in the 2020s (it's discombobulating that maybe the film's most normal color grading, not that it's entirely normal, involves surveillance video). Damn pity that Zhang's effort here, grotesquely splendid as it is, pretty much stopped cold with "cinematography," but it's a damned impressive travesty.
Score: 7/10
*I am assuming, I think reasonably, that Li edited Article 20—the credits on IMDB are incomplete for both, though Under the Light's screen credits say "editorial supervision" was performed by Li.
**Yet a big, big supporter of slave labor in Turkestan, you'll find!
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