ARTICLE 20
Di er shi tao
2024
Directed by Zhang Yimou
Written by Li Meng and Wang Tianyi
A fun thought experiment is to try to imagine how far back you'd have to go before the American equivalent of Zhang Yimou's 27th and most recent film, Article 20, could even potentially have been one of its years highest-grossing films, and I think the answer is "absolutely no later than the 1990s, and in anything like its exact configuration, probably the 1940s," which tracks given that it's probably the most Frank Capra movie I've ever seen, including all the Frank Capra movies I have seen, except the Capra movie would have looked actually good, probably wouldn't have countenanced the same amount of onscreen violence, and would've been orthogonal to the ideology of the ruling party of his day, rather than a condoned expression of it. It's a legal procedural, anyway (a 141 minute legal procedural*), that made $337 million, I believe working out to around 58 million individual tickets—I wouldn't even begin to speculate on how many multiples of its budget that was, given the mostly-televisual level of its production I alluded to when I suggested it might not "look actually good"—but moreover, it's a legal procedural that concludes with a big inspiring speech. It is, then, something of the converse of the backbone genre of the Chinese box office these past few years, the "let's metaphorically invade Taiwan" patriotic picture, such as Zhang himself has been instrumental in strengthening, and give it this much, Article 20 is probably healthier for children and other living things. It's a movie about how Chinese justice (and government in general) is flawed but, by gosh, everyone involved in it, even if they suffer in some cases from a pronounced degree of personal and institutional inertia, is willing to work to make it better and fairer—it's patriotic in the civic sense rather than a martial one—though I think if we want we can pick at it anyway, and not just from the purely cynical standpoint of "yeah, I bet that by and large they are actually not."
The title refers to Article 20 of the Chinese criminal code, a more-or-less reasonably standard extension of the defense of self-defense/defense-of-others to those accused of batteries and murders; this will come up later as the legal theory upon which a case and the morality of a whole nation turns (I guess the title is sort of an automatic spoiler), but for the present, we have such a man accused of a rather serious battery, Wang Yongqiang (Pan Binlong). Wang is not at present formally charged but detained until such time as the procuratorate's prosecutors determine his guilt—seemingly a foregone conclusion—and the appropriate sentencing recommendation. (If I am wrong about any of this, it is because Article 20 strongly assumes a Chinese audience and is disinterested or even anti-interested in explaining "how criminal trials work" in China—the basic thing is that it's an inquisitorial system, with very few of the adversarial features of Anglo-American law, and also has no provision for a jury as a finder of fact—though the climax is, I think, a hearing at the procuratorate, not a trial, which indeed are usually foregone conclusions by the time they get in front of a panel of judges, though it is immensely confusing to this American who all those new people at the hearing actually are, even as a matter of their respective positions in the room—it's three prosecutors taking questions from a bunch of folks, like a press conference, and it is televised, though the prosecutors also seem to be making their case to them as if they have some say in the matter.) Anyway, the circumstances do seem mitigating: Wang was chained to a tree in his courtyard while a loan shark raped his wife, and when the loan shark let him go, Wang pretty naturally attacked him even though he'd technically disengaged, though Wang at least claims that the part where he stabbed the loan shark was occasioned by the loan shark going back to his car for his own big-ass "knife," such as would be better described in English as "a scimitar." This is all very marginal, but influence weighs towards the defendant's guilt, since the man he stabbed was the son of a locally-prominent family of what appears to be trucker-gangsters, who also have the distinction of being a "martyr family," thanks to one of their number giving their life for the common weal during a flood.
This headache has passed onto junior prosecutor Han Ming (Lei Jiayin), who's not even that junior, but his career more-or-less flatlined immediately twenty years ago, so that his temporary posting to an unnamed city's procuratorate office (Article 20 was shot in Langfang), which he hopes to turn into a permanent position, is his long sought-after break. He demonstrates some skill at conciliation right from the outset, when he defuses a tense pro-prosecution protest from the gangsters at the procuratorate, but it's his bad luck, perhaps, that he's partnered with—or rather, she's her boss, and he is assigned to assist her—Lu Lingling (Gao Ye), and she's basically the reason this prosecution has been slow-walked to the tune of six months without charges, as she'd certainly strongly prefer to dispose of the case nolle prosequi (or Chinese equivalent) or at least find some way to reduce the criminal responsibility. Adding to Ming's headache is that Lingling is his old girlfriend—from pretty much a lifetime ago back in college, though this is sufficient for his wife Li Maojuan (Ma Li) to begin teasing him about infidelity with such neurotic persistence that you can tell she's already talking herself into taking it seriously. But work closely with Lingling he shall, as he comes to understand that she's right about the case (even if he's really resistant to admitting that) and they have to endeavor to get the exculpatory evidence and protect Wang's poor wife Hao Xiuping (Zhao Liying), who's deaf, and their daughter Juanjuan (Chen Xuanfei), who is also deaf, from Xiuping's rapist's family. And if that weren't enough, Ming and Maojuan's kid Yuchen (Liu Yaowen) beat up a bully at school and, because he was in the right, so unwilling to simply apologize that the scuffle is going to spin out into its own legal consequences.
To be blunt about it, it probably were enough; the "Yuchen, heroically getting into fights with bullies who happen to be the son of the dean of discipline, oops" B-plot, while obviously most thematically parallel to the A-plot, is the principal reason this is even over two hours long, let alone 141 minutes. It's not actually bad, but the most substantial virtue of it is that it gives Ming and Maojuan something to argue about besides an imagined affair, and while Ming's home life is vital and humanizing (and Ma's doing genuinely fine work translating a "screeching jealous wife" stereotype into something vastly warmer and better-rounded than that stereotypical label sounds), this is probably the place where Zhang and writers Li Meng and Wang Tianyi should've started tidying up and tightening their script. (Maybe even just making that affair somewhat more plausible than the complete delusion it clearly is—it's kind of wild how Gao comes off borderline-miscast to be a college girlfriend, even the sophomore/senior thing the film posits, because she looks fully fifteen years younger than either Lei or Ma, though she's not anywhere close. So I suppose it's actually good casting for the film's aims, though some kind of sexual tension in addition to the merely professional tensions might have juiced it a bit, while even having a side benefit of Maojuan coming off a skosh less nutty. Perhaps I am too American.)
The main show, on the other hand, the Law & Order two-parter that grossed $337 million, is legitimately good, a compelling yarn that I'm not sure wholly rises to the level of "legal thriller" but we can grant that aspects of it are thrilling—we'll come to it momentarily, but Zhang's most sustained effort at waking himself up to actually make this movie, at least before he arrived in the editing bay, arrives when the film's visual scope opens way up at a construction site, where Ming and Lingling are on hand to witness Xiuping make a very fraught decision in a very unwell state of mind. But then, I'm of two minds about it: the actual core of the movie is Ming's personality—calling it "a character study" might not be too far, but in any event it is an arc-like object for the prosecutor, who's only a small little man in a great big country, who's become unfortunately self-absorbed and has developed a great deal of passive-aggressive diffidence to handle the burdens of his life psychologically; and we probably don't get the fullness of that personality, or the fullness of Lei's chummy-yet-evasive performance—and, though I haven't mentioned it, the significant vein of comedy the film gets up to—without the sheer number of domestic scenes serving as a vessel for all that. (If that merely implies Lei is "good," let make that explicit, he's very good; of the three leads, Gao is the weaker link, especially early on before we've calibrated to the downright rigid way she's decided to essay "the last real lawyer in China," and before, I'd say, she's re-calibrated her performance on her own behalf, to allow some level of personality to enter that performance beyond the forceful declamation of what-is-right.)
There's plenty of good here, then—I'm affirmatively on board with all the performances here, maybe especially Zhao's, whose deaf rape victim of course has by far the showiest role and the narrowest channel for it, but it's a damned good melodramatic "focus of all the audience's pity" turn—but there is also bad. For one thing, it feels sort of vaguely insidious: by accident or (this is the insidious part) by design, this screenplay is weirdly insistent on the weakness of the Chinese state. I mean, this is the country that used to run over protesters with tanks, and effectively still does; but in Article 20, you can physically assault and threaten representatives of the state, public prosecutors—attempt to intimidate and kidnap and virtually kill a witness, right in front of them—twice!—and nobody does anything about it. (It doesn't help that the personnel of the procuratorate have these twerpy little short-sleeve uniforms that make them look like flight attendants on a cheap airline.) I am not an expert on China, but I am sure they have a functioning state, and I simply don't believe that a family of local yokel loan sharks would have that kind of sauce with the party—they're not, you know, Republican insurrectionists or anything—and so their invulnerability is some self-evident bullshit. Maybe as troublingly, though I'm willing to cut it so much more slack on this count because it is, after all, a movie, intended to inspire and entertain, not wrestle manfully with legal theory, but still, it really does not encompass the complexities of "self-defense," crafting scenarios (I didn't even mention the whole other case, involving a perpetual series of appeals to Beijing, that's yet another headache for Ming) that are so morally clear if legally borderline that it's plainly stacking the deck, while it never bothers to so much as pose the question of how such a hazy, "when it feels good" rule (if "rule" is even the right word) is supposed to be applied to fact patterns even slightly more ambiguous than the ones presented here. And I'm not even ill-disposed towards the basic idea of it (American society is way too keen on punishment, and I'm not being entirely facetious when I say American society needs more fistfights), but it kind of feels like the message you could take away from Article 20 is "engage in vigilante revenge killings, comrades! the law is on your side!", which I can't imagine is what the party wants, but there it is.
More importantly, we have Zhang, and with Article 20, on the back of Full River Red,** I'm ready to call it: the workhorse septuagenarian has just gotten fucking lazy, or at least he's begun directing his reduced energies towards one or two particular aesthetic ideas in ways that feel like what he's doing is giving himself permission to put no effort at all into everything else. In Full River Red, the "idea" was tracking shots through the most stultifyingly blue-ass day-for-night you've ever seen, with hip-hop (in a sword-and-sandal film?! I certainly got sent to the fainting couch) filigree. Here, there's nothing remotely so abominable, and it's just a movie that looks neither good nor bad pretty much all the time, just sharp, flat photography, which kind of rises to the level of a choice about realist objectivity, though it is a boring choice, and there's not any muscle put into the location shooting, rather like the location shooting was being heavily circumscribed by dint of a low-budget film taking place in the middle of a busy town of a zillion people (about five and a half million, actually), but there's few of the compensations that should have brought in terms of visual pizzazz and scale—it's why that construction site scene hits harder than it has any right to—so that there's not much sense of this as a big town, or a small town, or more than the same buildings over and over, not even to the extent something as hardscrabble as Zhang's The Story of Qiu Ju over three decades ago slammed you against the wall with the size and density of urban Shaanxi. And I am comparing like to (somewhat) like, since that was his other contemporaneously-set legal procedural. (This is "more technologically advanced and expensive," to be sure—there's non-trivial amount of narratively-necessary CGI—but there's a scene where our prosecutors are obliged to follow the gangsters' car and Zhang is relying on the Kuleshov effect across two who-knows-how-widely-separated takes to describe something that utterly simple.)
So the "idea" Zhang's working with here is that that sharp, flat photography is in fact very often just sharp, flat coverage from multiple-camera set-ups (sometimes even more-or-less on the same axis), and every time two characters manage to raise their pitch and cadence into an argument, which is quite frequently, it gets edited to ribbons, just bouncing around, hypothetically in tandem with the rhythm of the arguments, and very abrasively, and I am slightly annoyed that it does work at making the experience of watching his film more intense when the story it's telling gets more intense, because, again, there's so very little to it besides a certain brutishness.
But I do, in the end, and with all the caveats, like the story that it's telling, and the characters it's telling it about; and if there is one thing it seems like Chinese cinema can be counted on, it's a level of corniness manifesting as sincere idealism (feigned or not doesn't matter, since in the end it is only a movie, and appearance is all that matters) that you don't see pursued so much without ironic sandbagging (or glum severity) in American film. At least with a Chinese patriotic movie, even if about its biggest virtue is its corny sincerity, you get to recall what it's like when a society at least tries to have faith in its own future.
Score: 7/10
*Though Chinese audiences don't seem to value their short time on this planet any more than American audiences do, and their movies are also all too long these days.
**I cannot speak to Zhang's 2023 crime thriller, Under the Light, which had a very respectable Chinese run, and went completely under my radar, in that I didn't know it existed till doing my diligence for Article 20, which itself is not being very assertively pitched to American audiences for obvious reasons (I think it might've gotten a small release around Pittsburgh, but it also slipped past me). However, in keeping with my general project of cataloging Zhang's entire filmography in dribs and drabs here, I should be able to speak to it soon enough.
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