With its misty landscapes, meandering motorcycle rides and monologues about rural myths, The Night Rain South Township is proof that magic realism remains very much alive as a fashionable visual style among aspiring Chinese auteurs.
Revolving around a young man’s return to his hometown and his dreamy reminiscing about his clan’s change of fortunes, as rural China embraced urbanisation and emptied itself out at the tail-end of the 20th century, Li Binbin’s directorial debut is a poetic portrayal of Chinese provincial life of the kind that brought Bi Gan worldwide acclaim with his festival favourite Kaili Blues.
It’s unfair, though, to consider The Night Rain South Township as merely a facsimile of Bi’s winning, festival-friendly template. Li’s film actually has a more profound and socially conscious edge than all those wannabe mainland Chinese auteurs who have tried to duplicate Bi’s style and success. In the main character’s reflections on the transformation of his late parents’ lives in the 1990s, and on the way they and their peers contributed to the degeneration of their ancestral lands, Li has crafted a film with many elements that wouldn’t be out of place in Euro-American hauntological discussions about cultural memory and the cyclical return of the past.
At the centre of Night Rain is Chen Yu (Yuan Jiahuan), a young man returning to his small hometown in Shaanxi province in southwestern China. While he says he’s back to build a proper, better gravestone for his deceased parents, he also tells his best friend he doesn’t have a concrete plan about when he’s leaving again. His phone conversations suggest his new life as a subway mechanic in the southern Chinese metropolis of Guangzhou is unravelling fast, along with his urban dreams.
As he slowly comes to terms with life in his hometown, he rediscovers his parents’ aspirations when they were his age during the 1990s. In a black-and-white flashback Chen Yu experiences when he visits his parents’ old apartment, he (and we) witness how that generation in mainland China were awakened from their dull communitarian existence through pirated videotapes of Hong Kong movies, consumer-grade film cameras and the opportunity to find better jobs in the more prosperous cities of the tropical south – a relocation (and dislocation) mirroring Chen Yu’s very own struggle as an internal migrant worker.
Chen Yu eventually finds solace as he begins seeing a local schoolteacher (Chen Xuanyu), but the romance never really takes centerstage. Rather, Night Rain revolves around his rediscovered love of the land he once so desperately wanted to leave. Bolstered by Guo Kai’s fluid camerawork, director Li Binbin has managed to bring this rarely seen corner of China to the screen in all its natural glory and tragic decay. Through Chen Yu’s conversations with his once-estranged relatives, Li conveys the helplessness felt by people who are left living on the abandoned margins of a country whose focus squarely set on a gleaming, prosperous “Chinese dream”.
This is perhaps most evident when the prodigal protagonist talks to his uncle (Li Shicai) and learns about the way he and his colleagues have navigated perilous terrain for years to produce a precise map of the sparsely populated region, which their clan has inhabited for centuries. But soon after, all this toil was rendered obsolete in one fell swoop with the emergence of satellite technology. It provokes an abrupt social change similar to the depopulation tearing many a provincial Chinese town asunder, as young people flock to the city for a better life. What makes Night Rain engaging is its success in cloaking Li’s musings about all these pressing social issues with immersive imagery, as dreams and reality interweave to great effect.
Director: Li Binbin
Screenwriters: Li Binbin, Zhang Qian, Lin Heng
Cast: Yuan Jiahuan, Chen Xuanyu, Li Shicai
Producer: Dou Weijiang
Director of photography: Guo Kai
Editors: Huang Zhijia, Li Binbin
Production designer: Wen Zhe
Music composer: Xiang Yehui
Sound designer: Zhang Guodong
Production company: Shaanxi Runzhi Yinghua Group Limited
Venue: Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival (Chinese Competition)
In Southwestern Mandarin dialect
96 minutes
