In selected suburban multiplexes, where most spoon-fed Australian film critics are afraid to tread, you can – if you are quick – catch a box office phenomenon that so far has made more than $79 million (US) in its home country.
Only the stone hearted will be unmoved.
Kicking off with a stunning and frightening display of special effects Feng Xiaogang’s Aftershock not only depicts the Tangshan Earthquake of 1976 in which 240,000 people were killed, but dramatises in an engaging, entertaining and ultimately moving way the degree to which Chinese society has been transformed in the past 45 years.
After the Saving Private Ryan-like onslaught of Assembly (2007) and the wry intimate humour of If You Are The One (2009), with Aftershock Feng successfully merges larger than life thrills with the everyday struggles of growing up and growing old and, in the case of some, growing rich. It’s quite simply the best film to emerge from Asia all year and possibly a Best Foreign Film Oscar contender.
The story begins in the idyllic Tangshan of 1976. Nearly all transport is by bicycle and luxury is an electric fan. When an earthquake hits, Da Qing dies while preventing his wife Yuan Ni from running to their children’s rescue. When the dust settles, a hysterical Yuan Ni is told that both her living children are pinned under a concrete slab. Only one can be rescued. Frantically she chooses her son Da Feng who must have his hand amputated. Under the rubble Fang Deng is heart-broken to hear her mother choose her brother’s life over hers.
After the debris is cleared, Fang Deng miraculously survives. Taken to a refugee camp, the girl is adopted and renamed Ya Ya by a childless couple.
The story jumps ten years as both children Da Feng and Ya Ya are on the cusp of sitting for their college exams. After dramatising the strains of teenage children rebelling against their (step) parents wishes, Feng leaps another decade to their adult years in 1996. By this time the film’s wider theme of China’s cataclysmic shifts into modernity becomes more obvious. In the 1970s sequences the death of Chairman Mao Zedong is given due observance as a harbinger of political change, but the subsequent eras revel in technical advances including the ubiquitous presence of television in Chinese life.
By the film’s final instalment set in 2008, China’s economic miracle appears complete. But economic progress is merely a marker. The film’s heart is in its powerful depiction of a family (and a society) that not only survives trauma, but transcends it. More than a disaster movie (devoid of the genre’s usual ghoulish fascination with disposable lives) with a familial drama attached, this is a masterful work that should be seen by a wider audience than the mostly Chinese expats who are packing the cinemas of Chatswood, Chadstone and Tea Tree Plaza.
Only the stone hearted will be unmoved. This seasoned film critic found himself weeping in the foyer. If you only see one of the 450-odd films China produces this year"¦ make it this one.
