@Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Fri 26 Apr 2019

Mob boss Bin (Liao Fan) and his girlfriend Qiao (Zhao Tao) have a successful life in the rundown mining city of Datong, where Bin holds a great deal of power and influence. However, an encounter with a rival gang results in both Bin and Qiao being imprisoned for up to five years. When both of them are released, they find it hard to resume their old positions of power in a rapidly-changing China.

Acclaimed director Jia (Still Life, A Touch of Sin) uses Qiao and Bin’s relationship to not only chart their respective character developments but also to highlight the economic and social developments within China over almost twenty years. Examples include the coal mining dispute in which Qiao’s father is involved in 2001 giving way to Qiao and Bin’s underworld connections becoming successful legitimate businessmen by 2006. Jia also uses Qiao’s various post-incarceration encounters to highlight this high level of nation-wide economic development, such as her meeting with a stranger on a train who tells her of his plans to open a UFO hunting tourism company and who recommends that she travel to more economically booming areas such as Guangdong.

In contrast to their surroundings, Qiao and Bin are depicted as being lost in this new China where the mythical life of honour amongst gangsters has never been more archaic. Zhao in particular effectively depicts Qiao’s change in personality from self-assured hostess working for Bin to having to survive on her wits alone in order to reunite with Bin. Jia also shows how these changing circumstances have altered the power dynamic in the couple’s relationship, with the newly self-sufficient Qiao contrasted with the emasculated figure of Bin, who is reduced to working at a power plant and is later left disabled after a stroke. Like Zhao, Liao convincingly portrays Bin’s physical and mental decline, going from a powerful and intimidating small-time gangster to a broken figure in a wheelchair who can’t face life in Datong due to losing his position of power and respect.

Jia also shows China’s changing economic, cultural and social positions through other means – a particularly clever example being shifting the soundtrack from using Hong Kong Cantopop in the 2001 sequences to Chinese Mandarin pop music in later scenes to show the decreasing Chinese reliance on the former colonies of Hong Kong and Macau for popular culture. However, it is his tracking of the various twists and turns in Qiao and Bin’s relationship that effectively depicts how the changing circumstances for China affect two people on an individual level.