Zhao San (Wang Baoqiang) is one of four protagonists who break out into sudden acts of shocking violence in Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin
A TOUCH OF SIN (TIAN ZHU DING) (Jia Zhangke, 2013)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Tuesday, January 30, 12 noon, and Wednesday, January 31, 3:00
Series runs through February 10
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
www.kinolorber.com
During his sixteen-year career, Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke has made both narrative works (The World, Platform, Still Life) and documentaries (Useless, I Wish I Knew), with his fiction films containing elements of nonfiction and vice versa. Such is the case with his 2013 film, the powerful A Touch of Sin, which explores four based-on-fact outbreaks of shocking violence in four different regions of China. In Shanxi, outspoken miner Dahai (Jiang Wu) won’t stay quiet about the rampant corruption of the village elders. In Chongqing, married migrant worker and father Zhao San (Wang Baoqiang) obtains a handgun and is not afraid to use it. In Hubei, brothel receptionist Ziao Yu (Zhao Tao, Jia’s longtime muse and wife) can no longer take the abuse and assumptions of the male clientele. And in Dongguan, young Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan) tries to make a life for himself but is soon overwhelmed by his lack of success. Inspired by King Hu’s 1971 wuxia film A Touch of Zen, Jia also owes a debt to Max Ophüls’s 1950 bittersweet romance La Ronde, in which a character from one segment continues into the next, linking the stories. In A Touch of Sin, there is also a character connection in each successive tale, though not as overt, as Jia makes a wry, understated comment on the changing ways that people connect in modern society. In depicting these four acts of violence, Jia also exposes the widening economic gap between the rich and the poor and the social injustice that is prevalent all over contemporary China — as well as the rest of the world — leading to dissatisfied individuals fighting for their dignity in extreme ways. A gripping, frightening film that earned Jia the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes, A Touch of Zen is screening January 30 and 31 in the Metrograph series “Martial/Art,” which continues through February 10 with such other high-end martial-arts fare as Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Zhang Yimou’s Hero, and, appropriately enough, King Hu’s A Touch of Zen.