SYDNEY CHINESE FILM FESTIVAL: From its first moments Ocean Heaven seems to be aiming for sweetness, a lightness of touch and mood. The images are idealised as the movie unwinds, that is, until a harsher, darker reality emerges as the scenes play out. The film’s first scene sets up this ironic perspective. Set on a crystalline sea – made especially beautiful by renowned cinematographer Christopher Doyle – two men are sitting in a small boat.
We cut in closer to the guys enjoying their day out at sea. One is Dafu (Wen Zhang). Later, we’ll find out he’s autistic. Right now, in this moment, he seems a happy, good looking twenty-something with no worries. Perhaps he seems too happy; he's oblivious to the strained cheer of the man next to him. This is Sam (Jet Li), Dafu’s father. He has the sort of face most like to think as kind, but right away we recognise that there is a 'heaviness’ about him. He looks tired, worn out. In a short while, these two will be plunging to the floor of the ocean, a heavy anchor tied to their ankles. Still, the scene has no horror, but hope. Director Xue Xiaolu shoots it from under the surface, with the sun sending blinding white rays across the screen.
Xue Xialolu, who also wrote the script, takes her time with defining and shaping the drama, relying on getting us to identify with the characters first and explaining action later. This isn’t a bad strategy, since stripped to its basics Xue’s story is flat and not especially eventful. It’s about a poor working class man, a widower, in the late stages of cancer. Weary with the burden of illness and fearful of the future, he tries to kill himself, and his son. After this fails, Sam spends the movie searching for ways – mostly via China’s medical institutions – to ensure that Dafu has some quality of life after he is gone. The movie is best in its small details; Sam spends a lot of screen time teaching Dafu a routine – how to make a meal, catch a bus, work a job.
This material can play morbid or bleak, sentimental and patronising, but Xue very carefully negotiates the traps and pitfalls of what is often unkindly, and distastefully referred to as the 'idiot savant’ sub-genre. In this highly disreputable strain of movies (much beloved by Oscar voters everywhere), complex and subtle, medical, physiological, mental, and emotional issues are dove-tailed into a 'Saint’ kind of character, whose role in the world is reduced to making everybody feel so much better (see Rainman, Forrest Gump, Shine, and countless others). Apparently Xue has spent much time with autistic people and it shows. In the film, Dafu is very hard work on every level of human experience – but he is never less than human. The carers of autistic people are depicted as dedicated realists doing a job, not social martyrs.
Cinema audiences are used to seeing Jet Li kick ass. Here he looks prematurely aged, beaten-down, and fragile. It’s supposedly his first part in a 'serious’ drama; I assume that means in a non-genre film! Li is very fine indeed; he pulls off the neat trick of depicting suffering and selflessness. The rest of the cast is fine too, especially Zhu Yuanyuan who plays Aunt Chai, who has a deep attachment to both Dafu and Sam; and Chinese star Kwai Lun-mei has a cameo as a professional clown who 'adopts’ Dafu as a pal.
Much of the action is set at the Qindao Polar Ocean World. (Sam works there as a tech and Dafu uses the exhibits as a kind of playground.) Xue makes a lot of the water-imagery"¦ in this environment Dafu is an elegant 'creature’.
Ocean Heaven is not quite a realist film; its world is too kind, its cast too tolerant. I suspect Xue was after the quality of a fable. It’s a movie where death is followed by a re-birth, where suffering crawls away once hope comes.
