ONE SECOND
Yimiaozhong
2020
Written and directed by Zhang Yimou (based on the novel by Geling Yan)
It's difficult to say that Zhang Yimou's 22nd film, One Second, actually exists in the world, though I have seen it. It is not, of course, a complete phantom—if I found it, I'm sure that you could find it, and, beyond that, it has been screened in China as well as in the West. Nevertheless, the thing that it's probably most famous for is not being screened back in 2019 at the Berlin International Film Festival, from which it was withdrawn at the last minute, with the official rationale for its absence being "technical difficulties encountered during post-production." Naturally, the strong assumption amongst us foreign Zhangologists was that it ran afoul of the CCP, and it was withdrawn to be given another look by their censors—which is, I suppose, a type of post-production difficulty, so hey, it's not entirely a lie, right? There are indications that about a minute of the film was removed before it was ever shown publicly in 2020. In that year, it was given a release of at least some size in China, inasmuch that, if its box office numbers (around $20 million) are to be believed, I would have to doubt that any especially high fraction of that figure could've come from its international screenings—though in point of fact, that's not a very impressive number by the standards of the Chinese market either, so that release might not have been of enormous size, though my information tells me it was a wide release. In 2021 it was finally screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, with a smattering of subsequent foreign runs (not in America); and I have not been able, in four years, to find any incontrovertible evidence that it ever got any home video release, though it would be a fair inference to make, that were I able to watch it, it must've. So I'll dare to say that One Second has not been suppressed; at absolute worst, only disfavored.
If even this conjures notions of some hoped-for return to Zhang's roots as a boundary-pushing, even anti-authoritarian filmmaker (especially if you've been a little nonplussed by his turn to straight jingoism like Full River Red, and the commercial success such jingoism affords a filmmaker in the People's Republic of China), then I suspect you'd have to come out of it disappointed. Zhang has had a history of getting into trouble, it's true—most of it long in the past—but unless there was something outrageously fiery in that missing one minute (and I do not see how there could be), all we've got here is just a movie that takes place during the Cultural Revolution, and that's about it as far as potentially-objectionable material goes. Despite its subject matter—it's a film about film—it's also "about film" almost solely as a physical object, one that does have profound emotional and social value, but it's not about cinema as a medium for ideological messaging, or, indeed, any specific content, and accordingly it is not about its censorship. To the extent it intersects with the Cultural Revolution, it's solely to set the stage so the plot can happen, and to throw the setting far enough back in time for its story to work. It's as apolitical about the Cultural Revolution as I imagine you could get. I cannot speak to the source novel by Geling Yan, who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and has latterly emigrated to the United States, but the project's exigence could as readily be Zhang enjoying her books, since this is the third one he's adapted (after Flowers of War and Coming Home). It's not like the CCP of the 2020s are huge fans of the Cultural Revolution themselves. Anyway, if it's even about cinema as an art form, something sacred and not to be interfered with by bureaucrats, to take that idea out of it you'd kind of have to bring it in with you. To the extent it makes that argument at all, it's as abstractly and vaguely as possible.
So I suppose I was a little disappointed. But for now, we have some disclosures to make: I feel reasonably confident that I can evaluate it, but these were some suboptimal viewing conditions. I was only able to watch it subtitled in Spanish, and my Spanish is not good (it is, however, better than my Chinese, in that "it exists"). That sucks, then, but I had to take the opportunity as it was given, because I've been poking around looking for a chance to watch this movie for years, undertaking the kind of quest that's, funnily enough, the exact plot of this movie, which concerns its hero's desperate search for a stretch of movie only a few inches long—about one second, it'll turn out—though as the stakes of my quest were substantially lower than his, I suppose I succeeded to correspondingly fewer rewards.
Not to say there are no rewards, and it's a rather good little film, though by "little" I do mean it really is relatively slight. So: in a year equal to or greater than 1966, but not before 1977—I don't think they ever outright say, but the strong implication is the 60s—we find our nameless hero (Zhang Yi, inaugurating the actor's numerous collaborations with Zhang Yimou*) cresting a windswept sand dune somewhere in what I, but not the film, would identify as the Gobi Desert, though it could be the Taklamakan. He'll turn out to be a fugitive from a labor camp, sent there for striking a Red Guard (and hence concludes the "political" section of this plot); semi-skulkingly, he finds his way into a town in this desert, where they've just concluded a roadshow-ish kind of screening of 1964's Heroic Sons and Daughters. The fugitive steals some vegetables, but this puts him on hand to notice filthy urchin girl Liu (Liu Haocun and Liu Haocun's ridiculous wig) stealing a full reel of the film while its handlers are distracted. This incenses the man, for reasons we'll understand later, and he chases her across creation, eventually managing to detain her but not before the next stop on the dirt-and-gravel road through the desert. This means that the missing reel gets reunited with its siblings and with the projectionist (known to the town only as "Mister Movie," or, if we must, "Señor Film"; he's played by Wei Fan), though the bad news is that the rest of the film's been very poorly taken care of by the projectionist's subordinates, splayed across the dirt. The fugitive suggests they all get to cleaning it up, and the townsfolk heartily comply—Liu is still stuck hanging around, too—though our man's ultimate purpose doesn't even have anything to do with Heroic Sons and Daughters, because what he's after is a short attached to the program, a years-old propaganda notice that is of very low interest to anyone else but supreme interest to him, because it contains a brief glimpse of his daughter, who, between his sentence to the work camp and his wife's subsequent successful petition for divorce, is likely as not lost to him forever.
This goes to some degree how you'd expect, albeit with a certain hardness, due to the rather impossible circumstances, and it probably ends twice as many times as it needs to (there's a shot of the desert, that's a very obvious "final shot," but there's three more minutes of movie left anyway, out of some desire that it can't be too hard); it also does so rather circuitously, and the whole of a long first act is simply an obliquely presented chase movie where, somewhat thrillingly even, the objectives of neither party agree to resolve themselves into any clearly-cut motivation, and all we know is that the fugitive really does not abide movie thieves.
There is, and I don't think I'm spoiling too much to say it, a rapprochement between these adversaries; and the way that sort of found family melodrama works itself out is fine, sturdy, and sure, properly moving stuff. For Zhang's part, I expect the material spoke to him less as a man whose late adolescence coincided with the Cultural Revolution than as a man who also lost his daughter for a long time due to a divorce—in our protagonist's case, that was because he punched somebody who almost certainly deserved it, while in Zhang's it was because he was cheating on his daughter's mother with Gong Li, so there are some differences, but I suppose the basic emotion is probably much the same. (Happily, Zhang had made his rapprochement with his daughter some years earlier. I half-wonder if the film-within-the-film, Heroic Sons and Daughters, incidentally a Korean War-set propaganda film and almost certainly chosen primarily because its human plot has strong thematic parallels to this film, was nonetheless the prompt for Zhang Yimou and Zhang Mo's co-directorial collaboration just two years later, Snipers, likewise a Korean War-set propaganda film, for I can very readily imagine either Zhang looking at these primitive and rousing clips of a PVA soldier blowing away swarms of "Americans" played by Chinese guys with death's heads on their helmets—as was the style at the time for United Nations forces—and deciding, "I could probably do this better, and at least a little fairer.") It's not the cleanest scenario, though: I've got to say, I don't know who'd be outraged if we just simplified things and said our fugitive's daughter was in the actual movie that occupies so much of this story's energies, and maybe tying our protagonist's emotions to the emotions of Heroic Sons and Daughters' audience in some way. If star Liu Shangxian was off the table, then she still could have been one of the numerous female extras standing behind her during the big, rousing patriotic ballad scene. And my reading comprehension may have failed me, so I apologize if this is so, but Liu's reason for wanting this big roll of film triggers my one real objection to the movie, because it's preposterous—seemingly, it exists only to service this one image that Zhang has fallen more in love with than I can comprehend, a lampshade made out of filmstrips (Liu hopes it will better shield the light from her bookworm little brother's eyes while he reads); and I don't want to call that outright "stupid," but it sure is trifling and weird.
I do like everything else, and maybe above all how vigorously it propounds its central thesis—that movies are frozen memories and frozen history, and literal documents of their own making—without any of the pretension and overly-intellectual pomposity that usually attaches to that idea, by simple virtue of making this frozen memory, and this document of a movie's own making, important to this fugitive for the most human of all possible reasons, sufficient to justify the violence he eventually has to threaten to find that all-important one second. Even so, there is an emphasis on the physicality of the film inside this film—almost ironically, considering that by 2020 our director had already entered the second decade of his shift to a remorselessly digital filmmaking, but we can spot Zhang a certain nostalgia when some of the movie's most interesting imagery arises out of what a film reel looks like in various states, a big messy pile that you might well disregard as trash, or stretched out for a few miles up and down on a whole network of lines to be cleaned and restored to its rightful state as art. And there is certainly a kind of nostalgia here, not solely for the technology of the past, but how absolutely vital that technology once was: One Second succeeds more than any other task at simply being a recollection of a time when movies genuinely were more important to people and communities than they ever could be today—to some degree still tantamount to an actual miracle.
This setting does a lot to emphasize that, and the patience that Zhang demands (even though it's still a fun quasi-thriller) as we walk through deserts, and hitchhike through deserts, and get thrown out of trucks back into the desert, for at least twenty minutes out of a 104 minute movie, winds up paying off in the atmosphere of lonely desolation that attends this place. (That digital cinematography underlines this even further: Zhao Xiaoding is doing some pretty marvelous things with the daylight exteriors to wash out the sky and landscape, and make the sun this big white blob, without doing damage to our actors' coloration. The "blue miasmic night" that Zhang's unfortunately come to favor in the 2020s is, meanwhile, much more tolerable than it will be later in Full River Red, when the period setting means it isn't getting interrupted by pools of diegetically-electric light like it is here.) Even once we reach human habitation, it's a town that's been dropped into the middle of this desert for no discernible reason—what activity forms its economic basis is completely impossible to say, or even how it ecologically supports the number of extras that Zhang's marshaling for his film; even the amount of water they expend to clean the filmstrip seems like it's a legitimate sacrifice under these circumstances. It's all good and metaphorical: life without art is [One Second gestures at that dusty, dead desert].
But taken as a literal place where a literal story occurs? This is a community that could, believably, unite to save a movie, because, after all, who could say when the next one will come? And so we get a slam-banger of a show devoted to watching people watch a show, the film's single best images being Zhang moving through the makeshift movie house, packed to the rafters (also literally) with human bodies, with a "power of the pictures" sequence that climaxes with a hugely unexpected image that takes us through that movie screen, that's about as worshipful as any "power of the pictures" sequence I can name. Of course, the particular piece of cinema our guy demands, at knifepoint, to watch over and over is just a piece of scratchy junk that even the people that made it didn't care about, and even these lonely, desolate peasants aren't so desperate for any moving image that they can manage to care too much about years-old updates about industrial development and rice distribution; but even this still means the world to him.
Score: 7/10
*However, wherever I say just "Zhang" here, I mean "Yimou."
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