Border

The debut feature from Chinese-born, Thailand-based writer-director Ah Biao, Border is a visually impressive, heavily stylised exercise in rigorously spare neo-noir minimalism. The most left-field competition contender to premiere at San Sebastián film festival this week, this fatalistic depiction of loveless lives in remote frontier towns is bleakly beautiful but frustratingly, needlessly cryptic.

Composed of long, often wordless takes populated by catatonically reserved characters, Border has already drawn comparison to the work of feted auteurs like Jia Zhangke and Aki Kaurismäki. Ah Baio himself cites Dostoevsky as a key influence on his spartan quasi-thriller plot, which was party inspired by two real-life crime cases. The film’s uncompromising aesthetic, plus a handful of graphic sex scenes, will limit its audience to niche art-house circles. Even so, this artfully lo-fi production is a bracingly enjoyable cinematic experience, with a quietly haunting intensity that lingers long after its slender runtime.

Purposely vague in time and location, the story takes place in an unnamed mining town on the Chinese-Mongolian border. This forlorn post-industrial purgatory feels drained of colour and virtually deserted, its empty streets resembling De Chirico paintings at times. Ah Biao uses the city almost as a character, as desolate and hopeless as his human protagonists. Acting as his own cinematographer and editor, the director shoots these snowy boulevards, stained concrete walkways and prison-like subterranean tunnels as a series of precisely composed still-life tableaux. This strong visual dimension is one of the film’s main selling points.

Like the town itself, the mine is a hellish place, dingy and depressing and scheduled for closure. One lugubrious young mine worker, Luo Jia (Zheyan Li), shares an apartment with an older security guard (Sanming Han). The two men may be related, or simply co-workers, but their murky relationship has a queasy sexual undercurrent which appears bleakly joyless at best, grimly abusive at worst. Since both participants are so impassive and inarticulate, it is impossible to gauge.

But Luo Jia is shaken from his deep-frozen state when he meets a young Mongolian woman on the street, Su Qing (Feng Qi). She is a sex worker, glumly servicing the menfolk of the town to pay off some opaquely implied debts to a man who may be her pimp (Gang Zheng). Nevertheless, Luo Jia is enchanted and begins a tentative relationship with this brittle, secretive, possibly dangerous femme fatale. “Don’t get attached, women can’t be trusted,” the older man warns, with a pathetic hint of jealousy. “She’s only after your money…”

But the love-starved Luo Jia is hooked, and soon proposes marriage to Su Qing, imploring her to stop selling sex to other men. “Can you afford to keep me?” she replies coldly. A moot point because, fatefully, the mine has suddenly closed down at short notice, the workers removed by heavy-handed police enforcers. Luo Jia is newly unemployed, and his search for other work in the town only meets with harsh rejection. Adding insult to injury, his meagre savings are missing after a suspicious-looking apartment robbery.

Desperate times call for desperate remedies, driving Luo Jia to commit a violent crime which is shot so sparingly, we can only guess at the details. The aftermath of his actions signal a shift of tone and location, with Ah Biao finally displaying the film’s title credit an hour into the story, allowing various possible meanings to hang in the air. This late coda is the closest thing to a plot twist in a story that largely avoids plot, and prides itself on giving almost nothing away.

There is certainly something impressive about how Border sustains its hypnotic, painterly, ultra-austere aesthetic across an entire film. But it is also maddeningly opaque, and will leave some viewers craving more emotional pay-off from all this glacially handled tension. Ah Biao is clearly a talented all-rounder with a sharp eye, but hopefully his next film will counterbalance all this stylistic rigour with a little more dramatic substance.

Director, screenwriter, cinematography: Ah Biao
Cast: Zheyan Li, Feng Qi, Sanming Han, Gang Zheng, Tao Guo
Editing: Ah Biao, Hao Zhou, Xiaokai Ding
Music: Min Bai, Wenqi Qiao
Producers: Jenny Man Wu, Tyler Hill, Hao Zhou, Jing Yang, Xue Ma, Yaohua Li
Production companies: Borderless Films Ltd (Hong Kong), Mala Productions (US), Yangtze Visual Culture Co Ltd (Japan), Yilu Partners Co Ltd (South Korea), Time-In-Portrait Entertainment Ltd (China)
World sales: Reel Suspects, France
Venue: San Sebastián International Film Festival (Official Selection)
78 minutes
In Mandarin Chinese, Mongolian