Movies into Film

Blind Shaft

Directed by Li Yang

China, 2003

Bloody Good

Off to the mines in Blind Shaft (Photo: Kino International)

 

The laconic thriller Blind Shaft spins new variations on a story as old as the hills. The plot may echo Double Indemnity (staging a death in order to collect compensation) yet writer-director Li Yang’s cinematic vocabulary will have none of the traditional film noir language.

 

Let me tell you about the most gorgeous, sublime cut in recent editing history. Feng Ming, an innocent 16-year-old who has been picked up by two grifters who intend to kill him in a mining “accident,” has repeatedly stolen long looks at a photograph of a naked woman that he keeps carefully obscured underneath a layer of newsprint. After a traumatizing incident in a brothel, this sensitive lad, too romantic for hookers, takes a last shameful glance at the image on the wall of the shanty that he shares with the other miners, then he buries his desire by plastering over the photo. Until this, there have been several successive daylight sequences; the director abruptly cuts to the cool, subterranean dark of the mine, and the effect is wonderfully eerie.

 

Wang Baoqiang, the young actor who plays Feng Ming, gives the kind of performance that burns itself into your memory. (He’s taken home Best Actor prizes from both the Bangkok International and Deauville Asian Film Festivals.) In contrast to the writhing griminess of his murderous “uncles” Song and Tang, who can’t even remember the names of their previous victims, Feng Ming hesitates before eating if his hands aren’t washed. Blind Shaft has moments of sweetly human comedy embedded in its otherwise bleak scenario. The boy’s innate decency gradually works a spell on Song, and the look on Feng Ming’s face when he realizes that Tang means to kill him, realizes what the friendliness of these men has meant all along, is a searing, unforgettable image. As the villains, Li Yixiang and Wang Shuangbao are convincingly debased. – NPT

 

March 2004

 

Movies into Film

© N.P. Thompson, 2004

npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com

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