There is a long tradition of directors making cameos in their movies – think of Roman Polanski wielding a switchblade in Chinatown, or Alfred Hitchcock nonchalantly walking his dogs down the street in The Birds.
Nobody is going to confuse Jia Zhangke with the Master of Suspense, but the Chinese filmmaker's brief appearance as a gold-chain-sporting thug in his scintillating new drama A Touch of Sin has already been bringing the house down. "Every time I see him dressed like that, I laugh," says Zhao Tao, the actress who co-stars in the film (and married the director last year). "We had a screening in Melbourne, and when [Jia] appeared onscreen, the audience was roaring with laughter."
Australia is not the only country to give A Touch of Sin a hero's welcome so far. Since its premiere earlier this year at Cannes, the film has garnered some of the strongest reviews of Jia's career, which is saying something considering that, in 2003, The Village Voice declared him to be "the world's best filmmaker under 40." Back in those days, Jia was known as the enfant terrible of the new Chinese cinema, a maker of under-the-radar masterpieces that analyzed social problems and rankled the country's ruling authorities.
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If, a decade later, he's become less of a lightning rod for controversy, it's hardly because his art has mellowed. Not only does A Touch of Sin deserve its reputation as one of Jia's greatest films, it's also arguably his angriest.
"The people in the film are very angry," said the 43-year-old director in an interview at last month's Toronto International Film Festival. "But I think that the way the film is made and directed is not angry. It's more pragmatic than that. It spans geographically from the northernmost point of China to the southernmost China and the stories that take place in those places link up in a poetic way. I wanted to build a notion of interconnectedness between the different locations."
A Touch of Sin is beautifully structured: Each of its four narratives orbit characters who find themselves alienated in some way from the rest of the population. The common denominator to their troubles is money, or rather the lack thereof: The people onscreen are broke in every sense of the word. In the opening scene, a lone motorcycle rider blows away a trio of teenaged bandits who try to rob him at the side of a highway – a show-stopping curtain-raiser that seems to belong more to the world of action cinema than any sort of social realism.
"When I was preparing the movie, it was originally going to be a wuxia film," says Jia, referring to a martial-arts genre that dates back 2,000 years, but is now more commonly associated with crowd-pleasing movie spectacles such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero. "There is a very famous wuxia film by King Hu called A Touch of Zen, which was definitely an inspiration."
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The titular wordplay of Jia's film is telling. In lieu of inner peace, his protagonists are haunted by regret, never more vividly than in the story involving Zhao's Xiao Yu, a sauna receptionist whose affair with a married man spins wildly out of control. Zhao, who was so memorable as a bratty amusement-park worker in Jia's earlier The World, brings deep notes of melancholy to the role without making the character a victim: When Xiao Yu finally becomes a sort of avenging-angel figure, there's a strange exhilaration in the transformation. "The heroines of the past have typically used violence to serve their family honour, or in acts of vengeance," says the actress. "But I think that my character uses violence to reclaim the self-respect that's been taken away from her. She has to meet violence with violence."
Both Jia and Zhao see A Touch of Sin as a continuation of some of the oldest themes in Chinese literature, even as it depicts the realities of a post-globalization world. "I had been reading stories in Chinese news outlets [about violent behaviour] and they seemed like isolated incidents," says the director. "As they kept accumulating year after year, though, they started to remind me of old wuxia stories from a book of stories from the Song Dynasty in the 10th century. Each of those stories suddenly seemed applicable to today. Given these striking similarities, maybe it means that we haven't changed much."