Movie Review: Tangshan Earthquake: Aftershock

Aftershock, released on July 22 in over 4,000 Chinese movie theatres has a lot of hopes riding on it: The film cost around 100 million yuan to produce, it’s helmed by Feng Xiaogang, the nation’s most commercially successful director, and it’s the first IMAX-quality film to be produced outside the United States. The film has been heavily marketed—posters are everywhere and word of mouth campaigns have sought to hype it as an irresistibly engaging tear-jerker. With your ticket, theatres hand out little tissue packets for the unavoidable tears. With so much public interest, the film can’t wholly fail, the question is, with so much to prove, can it succeed?

Posters imply it to be a disaster movie, but it's aiming at something far more subtle—and far more ambitious. The film is set in Tangshan, a city outside Beijing which in 1972 suffered the most deadly earthquake of the 20^th century. Within a matter of minutes, 250,000 people died. The film follows the lives of a single family of four, sundered by the earthquake which forces the mother (played by Xu Fan, the director’s wife) to choose which of her two children to save.

Within the first half-hour, the earthquake has occurred and lives have been scarred forever. What follows is an examination of how people deal with such a disaster and continue on with their lives. The movie reveals itself to be a family drama, far less concerned with collapsing buildings than the with people in them and much more invested in piecing things back together than blowing them up.

The twists and turns of characters lives plays out against the backdrop of a changing China. Every event and every item in the meticulously designed sets is weighted with symbolism: A pair of married PLA soldiers in the 70s decorate their child’s room with era-appropriate propaganda posters; a family argument, taking place during the 80s, occurs as the characters are moving a refrigerator—an item just coming into coming use at the time; by the ‘90s, one character is teaching English and another is driving a car.

Such ambitions have their drawbacks. All this effort to make everything represent something larger means that nothing feels true to itself. A character goes off to work as a migrant worker, ten years later he is successful and driving his own car. Another character gets pregnant and contemplates getting an abortion. Many such actions, events, and decisions seem to occur not from the natural development of the characters, but because they serve to evoke a particular issue in Chinese society.

Likewise, those detailed sets, packed with so much significance, are often too nice. The interiors of character’s houses seem as realistic as the apartments on an episode of Friends. And, for all the attention to detail, the inclusion of blatant product placements is incredibly distracting—the audience I was in laughed when the camera paused for an extended time on a baijiu label. (The crassness of the advertising might have been lessened had the baijiu company not run the clip during the pre-movie trailers.)

The issue of product placement speaks to the current state of cinema in China. The country is on track to produce nearly 500 films this year and box office sales are up around 80% over last year. The CEO of IMAX has tripled the pace of new theatre construction and efforts are under way to develop mobile theatres to serve third and forth tier cities—China has around thirty cities of 1 million people that lack “an established multiplex structure.” Yet, despite all this, movies are still running at a loss. Easy access to bootlegs is a big reason as it depresses box office revenue, legitimate DVD sales, and the price studios can demand of tv stations for broadcast rights. The baijiu placement, however, nearly covered the cost of the movie.

The decision to hire Feng as the director was also a function of commercial calculation. His recent movies—The Banquet, If You Are the One, and The Assembly—have all been very successful and he himself is know as “pretty good at marketing films.” There is certainly much to admire: Feng and his cinematographer, Lu Yue, have created some beautiful moments—a particularly striking image is that of Tangshan on a New Year’s night, lit by the lights of a thousand burning joss paper stacks.

More generally, all those involved in the production of the movie should be commended for grappling with such a serious event. Tangshan may be the most deadly earthquake, but the film is being viewed with the memory of Sichuan’s earthquake fresh in people’s minds. (For comparison, it’s important to remember that United 93 and World Trade Center came out five years after 9/11 and met with public apathy.)

The movie is being compared to Sophie’s Choice in which Meryl Streep plays a mother, a Polish Jew forced to decide in a split second which of her children will die, but there is an important difference: Whereas Sophie’s fateful choice remained shrouded in mystery and serves as the crux of that film, the mother’s choice in Aftershock comes early, before we have much chance to care about the characters. This is, ultimately, the movie’s great flaw. Events are often too shallow, characters tend toward the two-dimensional, and a great deal of the emotion it creates comes from reminding audiences of something they really did emotionally connect with. The film itself, while good in many ways, never quite earns its tears.

Ma Nuo-ism: The Controversy Surrounding China’s Most Popular TV Show

[This will also appear in China Grooves magazine]

It may come as a surprise to many living in China, but, apparently, money and material possessions are of vital importance to young Chinese. More shocking: Such things are high among the criteria used to choose romantic partners!

If such details are unknown to you, then watching Fei Cheng Wu Rao (If You Are The One) will be quite a revelation. Produced by Jiangsu Satellite TV and airing on the weekend since January, the show is not unique, but merely the most popular among a slew of reality dating shows that have been hitting Chinese airwaves of late.

This particular show features a panel of twenty-four attractive, young Chinese women. Over the course of the program, they are introduced to a series of bachelors. At the outset, the man indicates to the host, Meng Fei, which girl he prefers—or, rather, in the show’s lingo, who “arouses his heart.” Over the course of three subsequent stages, the man tells a bit about himself via video clips of his home and work life and testimonials from colleagues. If the women find him unappealing in some respect, they can turn off the lights on their podiums. If, at the end of stage three, all the lights have been extinguished, the man is sent packing; if, however, lights remain, the tables reverse and it becomes the man’s turn to eliminate the remaining women.

As the show runs its course, candidates are asked to justify the reasons why they have eliminated one another. Westerners will be familiar with the self-promoting vanity and petty viciousness that reality show stars are capable of, but the bluntness of it has captured the attention of the Chinese and caused worry among officials.

During its first six months, Fei Cheng Wu Rao focused a great deal on money. As the men were introduced, little pop-ups on the screen would detail whether they owned a car or a house. Nor did the men play down such facts—one, Liu Yunchao, has been singled out for particular scorn for his extended bragging about his nearly million dollar bank account and multiple sports cars. While it’s worth noting that Liu was voted off the show an was actually an actor playing up the part, the underlying sense remains that morality and priorities he chose to display were in keeping with the show’s style.

Another controversial moment occurred when Zhu Zhenfang refused to shake hands with a male contestant, explaining: “Only my boyfriend gets to hold my hand. Everyone else, 200,000 renminbi per shake.”

The most famous contestant, however, is Ma Nuo. The young model from Beijing gained notoriety for her sharp rejection of a suitor. Asked if she would come for bike rides with him, she replied that a BMW would be far more “cool.” Her statement spread through the internet and metamorphosized into the more dramatic and memorable: “I’d rather cry in a BMW than laugh on a bike.” While the words are not hers, the statement sums up what many see to be the skewed values of modern Chinese matchmaking.

While such attitudes are par for the course on Western shows, in China it’s a revelation. The various contestants all reflect real dilemmas facing ordinary Chinese: Concerns over money and houses, over the involvement of parents, over a man’s ability to advance himself in the workplace. It’s easy to relate to many of the biographies and become emotionally caught up in whether or not a contestant finds a good match. Statistics show that many Chinese feel this way: Throughout May and June, the show was the number one program in China. Message boards flared up in discussions, stars became famous, rights were franchised off to different countries, and Jiangu Sattelite TV was able to charge astronomical advertising rates for it’s commercial slots.

This all changed at the beginning of June when the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) issued a statement criticizing the character of such shows, describing them as “vulgar.” It was emphasized that shows were not to allow models, actors, and “second-generation rich” free-reign to wallow in their wealth, promote unethical views of marriage, and preach “mammonism” for the whole world to see.

Joking aside, the prevalence of the attitudes seen on Fei Cheng Wu Rao is no surprise to anyone living in China and that is precisely the reason the government has decided to step in. A show of this sort, expressing the views that it does, is an affront to Socialist values and allowing it to continue without comment would imply acceptance.

To escape the cancellation that had met competitors like Wei Ai Xiang Qian Chong (Run For Love) in the weeks following the SARFT’s statement, Fei Cheng Wu Rao re-jiggered its format. Gone were specific mentions of money—though whether or not someone owned items which cost a significant amount remained permissible for discussion. A middle-aged psychiatrist named Huang Han was added to the show to dispense professional opinions, but meshed awkwardly with the youthful cast and disappeared after a few weeks. Overall, contestants began to emphasize their commitment to family and community. Passions for volunteer work suddenly came into vogue. Without a steady stream of moral corrosion to catch the public’s attention, ratings dipped.

As time goes on, more and more rumor and controversy swirls around the show and its more infamous participants. Ma Nou has, allegedly, been banned from appearing on all reality programming in China. Suspicious viewers have conducted background checks revealing that multiple contestants hail from the same Beijing university and suggesting that getting on the program is a fix. And a competitor, Hunnan Sattelite Television, has claimed the show is ripping off their program Women Yue Hui Ba (Take Me Out)— whose franchise rights they bought from an English broadcaster.

In short, uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.

Watching a recent episode, the difficulties of producing such a show were all too apparent. When the forth bachelor of the evening, a mild, bespectacled man with a squeaky voice and shy demeanor emerged, the podium lights immediately cut out by half. Then came his videos; one clip of him in a cramped officer with several other IT technicians and another showing him preparing lunch and stuffing it into a Tupperware container. Both clips were utterly depressing in their ordinariness and in their sense of routine. The man was utterly average and now found himself at the mercy of a panel of women, themselves under enormous pressure to dispense withering, memorable critiques.

What could be worse than an utterly average person to be unceremoniously booted off the stage and denied his shot at happiness. If this guy couldn’t succeed, who in modern China could have hope . . .And yet he won out! He found his match—and not just any of the women, but the one who had “aroused his heart.” Where an American show would never have included such a guy in the first place, here he was, on tv, taking home the girl. The cynics can grumble that it all seems staged, but the optimists and romantics can take heart. The show succeeds in so far as it balances the defeats and hassles of daily life with the possibility for love wining out in the end.

Photos: Kashgar

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