Balancing great formal finesse with a cryptic, elusive, dreamlike plot, Who is Sleeping in Silver Grey is the eye-catching debut feature of Chinese writer-director Liao Zihao. Shot in lustrous monochrome, this atmospheric period piece is full of poetic images and painterly tableaux that recall visionary icons like Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovksy, and Béla Tarr. If he aspires to a cinematic future beyond art-house circles, Liao will need to work on dramatic coherence, but as a composer of strikingly beautiful images he is already a virtuoso. Fresh from its world premiere in the main competition at Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn, this exquisite curio should have further appeal to connoisseur fests and specialist outlets. Domestic Chinese release is set for December 1.
The prelude is set in late 1920s Shanghai, where newly pregnant pianist Yang Zipei (Ze Ying) is widowed at a young age after the untimely death of her husband, a handsome Italian jazz musician. But the meat of the story takes place in the same family two generations later, in 1981. Cheng Die (Yinyin Ma) is a beautiful young schoolteacher who inherited her grandmother’s piano, musical talent and wayward bohemian nature. Invoked by Liao through opaque hints and fragments, Cheng’s illicit affair with the married father of a student at her school ends in shame and scandal. Fired from her job, she is assigned to a new school in a faraway town. But on the nightmare journey there she fights off an attempted sexual assault before fleeing into a misty nocturnal forest.
As this point Who is Sleeping in Silver Grey crosses the blurry border between reality and dream, from broadly naturalistic social drama to surreal fairy-tale fable. Following an eerie encounter with a centaur-like creature, Cheng washes up in a remote fishing port where all the citizens have mysteriously chosen to remain mute, apparently to protect themselves from a sinister ocean fog that regularly engulfs the town, a bizarre plot device straight out of Stephen King. The new arrival is welcomed by the townsfolk, but when her beloved piano resurfaces again, Cheng make a recklessly impulsive decision to play an impromptu concert, putting them all in danger. Forced to flee once again, her fraught exit involves a stolen baby, a Hitchcockian flock of birds, and other baffling detours into unpredictable melodrama.
Who is Sleeping in Silver Grey is frustratingly light on character psychology, social or political context, but it is too full of gorgeous imagery and wild narrative swerves to ever become boring. Liao is not being entirely obtuse, peppering his meticulously detailed audiovisual tapestry with teasing clues, from period radio commercials to posters for Communist China’s controversial “one-child” policy. These culturally specific allusions will resonate more with Chinese viewers than western audiences, but the director includes more universal references too. A fleeting clip of Marcello Mastroianni in The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991) by Theo Angelopoulos is possibly a winking homage to the late Greek auteur’s painstaking, visually ravishing style.
Mostly filmed in artfully composed medium shots and elegantly slow pans, Who Is Sleeping in Silver Grey is rich in heavily stylised mise-en-scene touches: crowds frozen in artfully poised living tableaux, mythical beasts wreathed in smoke, majestic mountain valleys viewed from high above, a flower-strewn coffin lid shot from below, and many more. Liao and his cinematographers, Xiaosu Han and Andreas Thalhammer, also keep returning to heavy rainfall and birds trapped behind glass as recurring musical motifs, presumably as metaphors for proto-feminist anti-heroines like Cheng Die, too free-spirited to be silenced by repressive power structures and outdated moral rules.
Whatever all this means, on a literal or symbolic level, Who is Sleeping in SIlver Grey works as pure cinematic poetry and marks Liao as a director of great promise. A soundtrack of Beethoven, Chopin and Rachmaninov piano pieces lend emotional shading to this spellbinding music-box movie, which never quite gives up its secrets even as its final notes fade.
Director, screenwriter: Liao Zihao
Cast: Yinyin Ma, Ze Ying, Lu Liu, Hongwei Wang
Producers: Enrui Shang, Yirong Zhu
Cinematography: Xiaosu Han, Andreas Thalhammer
Editing: Ruiliang Li, Ching-Sung Liao
Production companies: Hainan Flying Sparks Film and Television Co. Ltd.
World sales: Fortissimo Films
Venue: Black Nights Film Festival, Tallinn (main competition)
In Mandarin
103 minutes
