The long-awaited release of Zhang Yimou’s One Second, which came out in China in late 2020 in the middle of the pandemic, is finally here for Western viewers. Affectionately mimicking (and subverting) the bygone style of propaganda movies popular during Chairman Mao’s 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, like the kitschy war film Heroic Girls and Boys which is generously excerpted, it is a skillful recreation of a past time, world view and cinema conventions. The question is how far viewers will follow the director into this new-old territory. The reward for patience is a well-acted, sparely shot story that does not exactly fly by. It may be too minimal for most tastes, and festival slots are likely to be the main venues.
On the other hand, Zhang Yimou is one of China’s most widely recognized directors, and this flashback to the country’s ugly past of poverty and labor camps has some touching moments. Although the director has been riding high since his lavishly shot first films Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern in the 1980s and 90s, his international standing hasn’t protected him from censorship problems at home, especially since the Communist Party’s propaganda department took over regulating the entertainment industry a few years ago. One Second became a celebrated case after its last-minute withdrawal from the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, officially because “it wasn’t ready.”
Now it is apparently ready. After a bow in the US at the Woodstock festival, it opened San Sebastian, where it is playing in competition – and with strong hopes of winning a prize, despite the very real effort it demands of an audience. The contrast could hardly be starker to Zhang’s other film released in April this year sans festival, the visually gorgeous, narratively weak wartime spy story Cliff Walkers (aka Impasse). One might see the two films as a scission of the director’s early work, with one taking the social realism road and the other piling on the knock-out visuals. Fans will await a reuniting of the two.
Rather remarkably, this is the second film that Zhang has based on the same novel by Geling Yan, The Criminal Lu Yanshi. In his moving 2014 drama Coming Home, the protag returns from a labor camp after the Cultural Revolution to find his wife amnesiac and unable to recognize him. Here, instead, Lu Yanshi (Zhou Jingzhi) has just escaped from the camp and is frantically searching for his 14-year-old daughter. Since he has been declared an enemy of the people, she has been forced to disown him. Now the one idea that obsesses him is to see her in a newsreel where, he has been told, she makes a brief appearance.
Said newsreel is to be screened before a feature film to the villagers of several small desert towns, and Lu tirelessly treks after it. But it continues to elude him. First he is late reaching the cinema and finds people pouring out. Then a street urchin who he mistakes for a boy, Orphan Liu (Liu Haocun), swipes a film can that contains what he wants to see. The film’s slow-moving first half hour follows his adventures trying to get it back and then being mistaken for the thief. Perhaps because they’re dirty-faced ragamuffins and they’re shot almost as silent comedy, these scenes conjure up the ghost of Charlie Chaplin: the salute to cinema extends way beyond China.
Enter Mr. Movie (Wei Fan), the local projectionist and a small-time boss in the town. His initial generosity towards the famished Liu and Lu, along with his evident love of movies, disguise the lengths he’s willing to go to keep his job. When he discovers the 35mm newsreel has fallen out of its can enroute to his theater and has been dragged through the sand in a twisted heap, he enlists the aid of the entire village to clean the film, stimulating their enthusiastic (and improbable) community spirit and patriotism right out of Heroic Girls and Boys. One recognizes the gag, but it isn’t really that funny.
The tale changes register in the final sequence that details the projection itself. The burning desire of everyone in the village to watch a movie – any movie – is underlined in the way they cram into a huge empty building (they bring their own chairs) where a makeshift screen is raised on ropes. In this dark black space, the white sheet is the only source of light and hundreds of eager eyes are focused on it. The role of cinema in educating, or deceiving, the masses is crystal clear.
Beyond the film’s flurry of metaphors lies a lively human relationship between the sometimes violent and scary “bad element” Lu and the cunning Orphan Liu. It takes some time but finally ignites as a surrogate father/daughter relationship that diverts both from their obsessions. Though they’re unrecognizable, these two fine actors are the same who played debonair and glamorous Communist spies in Cliff Walkers, which makes yet another inside joke.
Though the story restricts the locations to a handful of basics, it’s not that One Second is without visual interest. Set in a desert province, the screenplay allows ample space for D.P. Zhao Xiaoding to paint the varying moods of endless sand dunes, from a raging sandstorm that introduces the protag doggedly making his way to a distant movie theater, to the sinuous shadow lines that appear when the sun is low.
Director: Zhang Yimou
Screenplay: Zhou Jingzhi, Zhang Yimou, based on Geling Yan’s novel
Cast: Yi Zhang, Liu Haocun, Wei Fan
Producers: Ping Dong, William Kong, Liwei Pang, Shaokun Xiang
Cinematography: Zhao Xiaoding
Art director: Chaoxiang Lin
Editing: Yuan Du
Music: Loudboy
Sound: Jing Tao
Production companies: Huanxi Media Group (Hong Kong/China)
World sales: Wild Bunch
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (competition)
In Mandarin
104 minutes