Jiang Wen, middle, as Pocky Zhang in 'Let the Bullets Fly,' which played at the Hong Kong International Film Festival.
An 800-pound dragon hovered above the screening rooms of the recent 35th Hong Kong International Film Festival, which showcased 300 films from all over Asia. With its newly insatiable appetite for entertainment, its rapidly expanding movie industry and its insistence on censorship, mainland China has become, for better and worse, the dominant force in Asian films.
Everyone at the festival, filmmakers and producers alike, seemed to be talking about it. Hong Kong directors and world-class stars such as Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Andy Lau and Chow Yun-fat have been moving to the mainland, where the action is. Chinese competition for audience share has compounded Hong Kong's already acute problem of competing with Hollywood. Beijing's tight import controls—currently 20 foreign films a year, though that may loosen in the near future—are forcing more producers from Hong Kong and elsewhere into co-productions—deals with Chinese partners that circumvent the quota but come under the censors' gaze. And Chinese tastes have shifted. The most telling emblem of that shift is Gong Li, the peerlessly beautiful star of such classics as "Raise the Red Lantern" and "Farewell My Concubine." Her latest film is a mainland remake of the Mel Gibson-Helen Hunt romantic comedy "What Women Want."
What moviegoers want is what they've always wanted, diversion from the concerns of real life. They certainly got it from the festival's opening-night feature, "Don't Go Breaking My Heart." Directed by the veteran Hong Kong team of Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai, the film reflects Asia's new embrace of upscale romance. The heart belongs to a pretty financial analyst who fixates on a handsome fund manager and a playboy at heart; he has his office in a building opposite hers. They communicate at first by sticking Post-it notes on their respective windows, but the guy who finally wins her heart does so by posting a message of love in neon lights on the side of a soaring high-rise that reflects the explosive growth of Asian real estate.
Cheerfully trivial and consistently lively, the movie was made in Mandarin, rather than the Cantonese of most Hong Kong productions, to appeal to the widest mainland audience. And appeal it will, since the plot obeys every rule of the censorship game: no sex, politics or violence. Fortunately for fans of unabashed Hong Kong exuberance, other movies were made to please mainstream audiences outside China, and the censors be damned. The most flamboyant example was "Hi, Fidelity," a gleefully licentious, pansexual comedy by the Hong Kong songwriter, filmmaker and soccer commentator Calvin Poon.
The story amounts to "Women On the Verge of Multiple Orgasms." Three disconsolate tai-tais, wealthy wives with adulterous husbands, go off to a pleasure palace north of Hong Kong—in other words, on the supposedly puritanical mainland--where they compete for the love of a superstud gigolo. No one could accuse Mr. Poon's film of subtlety, but it offered a degree of titillated delight that was rivaled only by the hugely popular trailer, shown at a film mart associated with the festival, for "Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy," a 3-D porn movie with a nubile princess and bullets coming at you from the barrel of an antique gun. (Pairs of bullets, if you took off the Polaroid glasses.)
In the best tradition of big festivals, many films were serious reflections of the human condition. Among the relatively conventional Chinese features I admired—and I concentrated on seeing Chinese features—was "Chongqing Blues." In this strong and eloquently acted drama by Wang Xiaoshuai ("Beijing Bicycle"), a merchant seaman returns home to come to terms with the death of his son, who'd been shot by a cop after taking a hostage in a shopping mall. But conventional filmmaking can't do justice to the complexity and titanic scale of China's transformation in recent decades. That's why the twin highlights of the festival were the presence of Jia Zhangke and Jiang Wen, world-class directors by any measure and the two most adventurous filmmakers in China today.
They could hardly be more different in temperament and technique, though both have paid a steep price for displeasing the censors. In Mr. Jia's case it was the decade that began with his arrival at the Beijing Film Academy in 1993. During that period he worked daringly and prolifically as an underground filmmaker, but he wasn't allowed to show his films in public until the 2004 release of "The World," a beguilingly poetic feature set in a Beijing theme park. In Jiang's case it was the five years during which he was forbidden to make films following the triumphant but unauthorized showing of his tragicomic masterpiece "Devils on the Doorstep" at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix.
Mr. Jia, a slight, soft-spoken man who looks younger than his 41 years, is sophisticated in the realm of film esthetics—and of footwear; he wore Pradas to an interview marathon—but essentially earnest in his desire to document the life around him. "I just want to tell the truth," he told an audience of young people at a master class organized by the film festival. He minced no words about censorship. "The current system is regrettable," he said, "but we have to keep working, otherwise Chinese films just become a big cartel." His previous work includes the majestic 2006 feature "Still Life," in which a dramatic framework helps convey the human costs of the Three Gorges Dam. The festival presented two examples of his most recent work, and they were fascinating for different reasons.
"I Wish I Knew" takes its cryptic title, and soundtrack signature, from a ballad sung by the 1940s American crooner Dick Haymes. Mr. Jia's film combines poetic and occasionally polemic flourishes with a series of enthralling interviews to evoke the vibrant present and turbulent past of China's most cosmopolitan city, Shanghai. To watch these accounts of assassinations, exile and savage strife is to understand more fully the epic suffering that preceded China's new prosperity.
For "Yulu," which Mr. Jia produced, the filmmaker invited six young directors to make a dozen short films about young people in contemporary China. Seeing the phrase "young directors" in the program, I assumed them to be angry, or at least following in the subversive footsteps of Mr. Jia's student days. In head-spinning, mind-numbing fact, though, all of them seemed to be following the same entrepreneurial playbook. Instead of collectivist propaganda, their segments peddled self-empowerment propaganda. Believe in yourself, their subjects droned. Persevere to succeed. "My personality is what I'm most proud of," one announced insufferably: "I rarely lose to others." As it developed, the irony-free production had been financed by Johnnie Walker, whose catch-phrase "Keep Walking" might well have been conceived as a new-China motto. Did Mr. Jia and his colleagues feel they'd been co-opted by commerce? Did they care? Or was "Yulu" an olive branch that Mr. Jia had craftily extended to the censors in advance of some new and provocative project? I wish I knew.
Jiang Wen is many things, but earnest isn't one of them, at least in public. At the age of 48, and a celebrated actor as well as a dazzling filmmaker—I heard him described as the Chinese Marlon Brando—Mr. Jiang has the buoyancy of an absurdist, the edge of an ironist, the camouflaged instincts of a moralist and the limitless zest of an entertainer who, from the evidence on the screen, might feel as much of a kinship with Abbott and Costello as with Beckett or Buñuel. (I'll be writing more in the near future about "Devils on the Doorstep," which screened at the festival, and is the essence of absurd until it's suddenly not.)
His latest film, "Let the Bullets Fly," a freewheeling, sharp-witted action adventure set in China's warlord era of the 1920s, has managed to speak satirically, if obliquely, about political corruption and injustice and, at the same time, to break all box-office records—more than $100 million to date—for a Chinese movie in the domestic market.
When Mr. Jiang met me for brunch in a Hong Kong hotel, he brought several colleagues plus an English-speaking assistant, wore a pair of earbuds twirled around his neck and seemed poised for a quick getaway. Still, the subject of absurdity engaged him. "China is a comedy place," he said in his genial though limited English. Then he expanded, in Mandarin, on the theme of existential chaos. "How old were you when you realized that the world doesn't make any sense?" he asked. "I'm almost 50 and I know I can't control anything except, maybe, the movie I'm making."
Was that awareness what kept him going as an artist? He pondered the question as it came through the interpreter, then took my notebook from my hand. "Not that. This. This is what I think about all the time." With my pen, he carefully wrote out several dozen characters from a poem by the Song Dynasty poet Xin Qiji. The poem, I Iearned, is about the wisdom—though not the ability to express it—that comes with growing older. A loose translation of Mr. Jiang's excerpt might be,
When I was young I did not understand melancholy.
I just wanted to climb, higher and higher.
Nowadays I understand the taste of melancholy.
I want to talk about it, but I give up even before I try.
That's the last thing I expected him to reveal, but in the context of his world view it made perfect sense.
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