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(More customer reviews)A noticeable trend in world cinema in the last three or four years has been to fuse drama with noir elements and here's an excellent example of that fusion from China.
Directed by Wang XiaoShuai (Beijing Bicycle), this is the tale of two men from rural China who come to the city (an unnamed large urban center in mainland China) to seek their fortunes. One, Gao Ping, has a slicker approach to life, needing to make real money--and feels the only way to do that is to work with underworld figures in semi-shady dealings. The other, Dong Zi, sticks to the life he knows best from his native village and works as a "shoulder pole", a laborer who hauls boxes every day for menial wages.
Dong Zi retains his rural ignorance of city ways, but what comes across more than anything else is his complete innocence and straightforwardness. His friend Gao Ping becomes increasingly mired in the dark side of life. This comes to a head when he meets a nightclub singer whom he is sure knows the man owing Gao Ping money. He kidnaps her but the two fall in love--or, as Gao Ping puts it, what passes for love in the city--and ultimately, because she belongs to "the Boss", Gao Ping is a hunted man.
Eschewing the overly stylized approach of countryman Wang Kar Wei, Wang XiaoShuai has made a stronger film. The one obvious concession to style is the use of a green filter for flashback scenes; this works well because aside from the green tint, these scenes include action that is as straightforward as Dong Zi's character.
The constant juxtaposition of innocence and experience is what gives this film its striking emotional power. The singer herself moves from one mindset to the other in the course of the film, emphasizing the theme, and one can even detect minute bits of innocence in Gao Ping, at rare monents, and, towards the end of the film, just as tiny traces of experience in Dong Zi's psychology.
A very well crafted film; recommended.
Click Here to see more reviews about: So Close to Paradise (1998)
SO CLOSE TO PARADISE tells the story of two friends, who--like many other Chinese peasants--leave their small country village to seek fortune in the city. Instead of the life they expect to find, Dong Zi and Gao Ping must live together in a shack on the river in the city of Wuhan, where Dong works on the docks while his friend Gao becomes a petty criminal. When a powerful gang boss cheats Gao, he takes his revenge by kidnapping the boss's mistress Ruan Hong, a beautiful, seductive nightclub singer. However, when Gao falls in love with Ruan, his fate is sealed.Set in the seedy nightclubs and desperate streets of Wuhan, SO CLOSE TO PARADISE uses a classic Hollywood noir blueprint of a gangster's love-triangle but it also references something much deeper. Rather than attempting to glamorize the gangster lifestyle, Wang casts his gaze on the harsh realities of urban life and the limited possibilities for the lower classes of China. Wang's "ability to nimbly filter big questions and political concerns through the lives of society's fringe dwellers--without being didactic--is what makes SO CLOSE TO PARADISE so moving and so timely." (Ernest Hardy, LA Weekly)
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