Review of A Touch of Sin (2013) by Art S — 26 Oct 2017

Not quite what I expected from director Zhangke Jia but perhaps even better because of that. I'd already seen Platform (2000) and The World (2004), which I recall as being character-driven realist dramas set in a China engaging with capitalism and all its problems.

That theme continues here but Jia has drawn four violent "true crime" stories from the news and dramatized them with a startling "in your face" quality that seemed absent in the previous quieter features.

The stories are interlinked by virtue of overlapping locations (and briefly glimpsed characters) but they don't really come together to create a gestalt. What they do share is the sense that China is now under the sway of a very powerful rich elite who exploit and subjugate those with lower status (particularly women, perhaps).

It seems surprising that Jia was able to express these problems openly from Mainland China or perhaps criticism of the effects of capitalism is still in line with government views despite the cultural changes.

Briefly, the events on display involve a man angry with his local village elder for selling out their community and taking bribes, a young man who freely uses a handgun for senseless violence (and to steal designer bags), a sauna receptionist who fends off businessmen demanding sex (with a martial arts wuxia styled attack), and another young man who is subjected to a number of low paying and degrading jobs (including in a brothel for rich elites) resulting in his total alienation.

Physical violence is present in all the tales, often shockingly and graphically so, but documenting the moral and spiritual violence that is done to the main protagonists may be Jia's real aim. He also has a great eye for Chinese locales, frequently showing his characters as tiny figures dwarfed in the face of giant factories or desolate rural landscapes, powerless as they also are in society.