Cover of The Story of Qiu Ju

Unlike his other major films of the Nineties, Zhang Yimou‘s The Story of Qiu Ju (1993) is set in contemporary China and is thus not a period piece.  It is, however, a film that enables him once again to censure authoritarianism (read Communism) while unassumingly focusing on other subjects and themes as well.  The elusiveness of justice, the problem of persistence without thought, the alien nature of the big city to a rural denizen—these are the most important themes.  The struggle to win an official apology is Qiu Ju‘s subject.  The struggle is undertaken by a pregnant peasant woman (Gong Li), and the movie ends sadly enough to further buttress Zhang’s vision.

(In Mandarin with English subtitles)

A very satisfying fiction is Bernard Malamud‘s story, “Idiots First,” a fast-moving, tough-minded achievement. Nobody does desperation better than Malamud as he describes the doings of a dying elderly man trying to acquire enough money to send his mentally impaired son to the son’s uncle.

The story is dark but not at all despairing. A ray of light is tossed in when a lurking grim reaper (he is supernatural and hangs around the elderly man) proves he is something more than a creature of “awful wrath.” It brings some mild relief; “Idiots First” brings fascination.

Train to Busan (2016), by Sang-ho Yeon, is one of the best entertainment movies I’ve seen, and it deals with zombies. From South Korea, it resembles pop pictures of the past (like Invasion of the Body Snatchers) in that it is character-rich and tells an actual story, without being over-plotted.

Gong Yoo plays a divorced father who is selfish and discourteous until he has to protect from the biting zombies his small daughter and her pregnant, supportive friend. The film has an outstanding child actor in Su-an Kim, and the action is exciting. Plus, Busan is poignant—something you don’t find every day in a non-artistic pop movie.

(In Korean with English subtitles)

A plane crash leaves alive only three people, who are now stranded for several months on an island owned by a recluse named Robinson (not Crusoe). The island is called Robinson too. One of the survivors, January Marlow, is the narrator of this a novel by Muriel Spark, Robinson (1958), and she I gather to be a conventional Catholic.

Among the themes of the book is Catholic tyranny, which has existed in history. Robinson the man (not January) is a Catholic tyrant, like Henry the Eighth in his later years. Unorthodox, he dislikes the material manifestations of Grace such as the rosary. But Robinson’s tyranny can go only so far. The other men, and survivors, on the island are Jimmie, who becomes January’s friend, and Tom Wells, who does not. Wells is an “occultist” who gets fresh with January and, later, even tries to kill her. Belief can be morally irrelevant—or relevant. (Another theme.)

Robinson speaks the obvious: “Human nature does not vary much.” It plainly does not on the man’s island. Spark, at any rate, intends this to be another of her novels that concern transcendent hope and truth. The characters anticipate being rescued from the island by a pomegranate boat which will arrive in August. What’s more, by and by the island begins to sink. As some of Spark’s sentences echo biblical language, the island she is no longer on somehow reminds January that “immediately all things are possible.” As, according to Scripture, they are with God.

I never finished reading Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, but I assume it has all the human appeal that pervades the Ang Lee film version of 1996.  Human feelings matter to Lee, a literate and painstaking artist, and Austen’s novel matters to Emma Thompson, who wrote the dandy screenplay.

This was Thompson’s time to shine.  She was intent on being true to Austen and lovably convincing in the role of Elinor Dashwood.  She evokes the state of suffering in silence well, and is nearly as poignant as the effective Kate Winslet (as Marianne Dashwood, a character I was slightly embarrassed by).  Other actors are extraordinary as well:  e.g. Elizabeth Spriggs as Mrs. Jennings.  Congrats to Patrick Doyle for his pleasant music.

Way to go on the adapting, Lee and Thompson.

Sense and Sensibility (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)