Feature

11 Flowers Review

Mood of revolution captured via child's eye view.

Source: SBS Movies

CANBERRA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: Mao’s Zedong’s repressive Cultural Revolution, which turned China inside out for a decade starting in 1966, has often been a touchy subject for the country’s filmmakers. Major directors including Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige landed in hot water in the 1990s when they showed its crimes against humanity a little too unflinchingly for the censors’ comfort.

Approaching the subject from a discreet distance proves to be a smart approach

Despite this, Chinese filmmakers keep returning to this convulsive period. Too many of them grew up during its ructions for them to remain personally unaffected as adults, and the dramatic possibilities – assuming they’re handled in a way that doesn’t upset the authorities – remain hard to resist.

In 11 Flowers, Xiaoshuai Wang (Beijing Bicycle) views events in 1975, one year before the Cultural Revolution came to an end with the death of Mao, through the uncomprehending eyes of an 11-year-old boy. Approaching the subject from a discreet distance proves to be a smart approach. What we lose as viewers in factual understanding, we gain in atmosphere and feeling, gaining an acute sense of what it might have been like to be young at this time.

Wang Han (Liu Wenqing) is living in a drab, grey town perched above a spectacularly scenic river valley in southern China’s Guizhou province, his mother a factory worker, his father an actor who wants him to grow up to be a photographer. Major ructions are strewn through the film yet glimpsed rather than clearly seen; mere mysteries of the adult world that mark Han’s passage from childhood naïveté.

Han and his three male friends (a kind of Gang of Four?) like to hang out in the gorge, where one day they’re intrigued to see the commotion around the discovery of a man’s corpse on the opposite side of the river. Han’s parents and their neighbours and friends discuss this and other events happening in town in whispers, speculating about rumours but usually quickly changing the subject to something less risky lest their words go reported.

At heart, though, this is a coming of age story set against a political backdrop rather than an obviously political film; a tale about a youth’s dawning awakening to a dangerous adult world of mystifyingly ferocious political gang fights and such non-political but very adult tragedies as rape and revenge murder (the latter being violent events the audience, like the youths, never see).

Han’s overriding problem in the opening scenes is how to get hold of a gym shirt after being appointed as a gym leader at school. His mother, a poorly paid factory worker, can’t afford one and gives him a hard time, but scrapes together enough to make him one after buying material. Trouble looms when Han loses the shirt only two days after acquiring it, thanks to a Great Expectations-like confrontation on the riverbank with a criminal on the run who threatens that he’ll find him and kill him if he speaks of having seen him to anyone in town. From here onwards there’s a shadow hanging over Han that’s extended to his three friends when he shares his secret.

The director captures this with a strong feeling for visual composition – the sense of place is powerful – and understated performances that allow us to warm to the characters without feeling we’re being manipulated.