I am Not Madame Bovary (China, 2016)
This movie will bore most people; it's certainly an arthouse flim, and many will stop right there.
The photography here is just extraordinary, and I'm kicking myself for not seeing this in the theater when I had the chance last summer. It uses the conceit of a "circular aspect ratio" for most of the movie, and a square box for the rest of it. This circular thing maybe could have worked well if it was projected on a huge screen, so that it extended to the limit of your peripheral vision. But it just looks like you're watching the film through a little hole you made, curling your index finger up in front of your face. I think the director was trying to "push the boundaries of form" by messing with the aspect ratio like this. Or maybe it's a commentary on the formal limitations of life in China, but there are no answers to that...
... Which leads us to the substance of the film. It's told like a fable, with some guiding narration; Lin Xuelian is a woman who has been wronged by her lout husband, and looks to the court for redress, but doesn't get it. She litigates for years and years, and the movie is about how that process goes down in China. This movie is a deep and thick commentary on "how things go in China" and I found is super interesting on that level. Basically there is a lot going on here, only a small portion of which I understand, but the part I don't understand isn't necessarily interesting -- and this is an exact metaphore for China itself.
Oddly enough it's labeled a "comedy," but it's not funny (with the exception of a few wry observations). You would have to be really Chinese to find this funny, and I suspect 99% of Chinese would find this movie irritating, because they don't like talking about... things... for complex but obvious reasons. I must say, it's the funniest, most romantic, and most entertaining movie about a Poiltburo meeting I've ever watched, and I'm not kidding about that. It's a broad commentary on how the Party and all the levels of government from the highest levels to the local cops try to respond to criticism and problems in a Chinese way. In fact, all of the dialog between government officials is the best part of the film. But much deeper than that, it's about how people try to cope with the hypocrisy that you have to execute as a participant in human society. Like every society, China hangs together with a very complex set of social norms of behavior that everybody sort of understands, but a lot of people fall off the bus and it's moving pretty fast.
What's fascinating is that this as close as it gets to a sharp and biting satire and examination of China's government you will find in China. And the only reason it was allowed to happen is because it doesn't actually criticize the government [Good time to recall: every single film made in China, domestic and foreign, has to submit its script to the government for Approval] -- it just shows what they actually do and think, in a way that seems faintly ridiculous in the context of a movie, but which people find perfectly acceptable on a daily basis. The Party can't ban something for exactly portraying their policies. So, as filmmaking, is this clever and witty and deep, or just pathetic? It's pathetic. But still very interesting. Just like China itself.
As a film, like I said, the photography comes to fore. If you ever watch movies just for the photography, you might want to see this -- the trailer will tell you enough. Personally, as an impassioned-amateur photographer, I was blown away. I learned things.
I'm no fan of the Fan Bing Bing. But they uglied her down and let her just act, and she was more than competent to do the role.
@sitenoise has got me thinking that I have to address whether there is any objectionable eating or drinking or smoking or passing gas here... lol.
This is one for the Sinophiles, or if you're even sino-curious on a sociological level, I can recommend it. It's not bad as a movie, and although it's limited in the same way that everything is really limited in China, I would call it a socially significant work. 8.32/10
We could all start a million posts on the funny dialogues/scenes on this one.
