SYDNEY CHINESE FILM FESTIVAL: Liu Jie’s film Deep in the Clouds is one of 10 titles competing for the inaugural Golden Koala – someone had use that trophy name first – as part of the Sydney Chinese Film Festival, which is about to enter its third year. And what an unusual film it is.
The setting is a small farming community in a remote and strikingly picturesque river gorge on the border between China’s southwestern Yunnan province and Burma. As the film opens with a wedding ceremony, the colourful traditional costumes and strange, non-Mandarin language being spoken indicate a culture new to most Australian observers of Chinese cinema, that of the Lisu ethnic minority.
The rambling narrative revolves around the fraught relationship between the villagers and the bears that live in the region. The black-furred creatures – much smaller than the American grizzly – have started to come down from the mountain and are threatening the lives of the wild stock as well as their human owners. But as the village elder, an ancient who mostly sits indoors smoking his pipe, reminds the locals, killing the bears is forbidden because of their spiritual significance as the people’s ancestors.
A further impediment comes from the local government official who reminds the farmers that killing them is also illegal since the bears are a protected species. So well-regarded are the creatures that the government eventually decides to banish the humans from the area to allow the bears to breed – not exactly a move that’s widely appreciated.
Woven not entirely successfully into this main narrative strand is a teenage love story between the elder’s grandson and a girl who is promised to another family in order to raise a dowry her father needs to get her brother out of jail for stealing bark from a rare plant. The rule-bound implacability of the Communist administration emerges as a theme, though Liu Jie takes care not to appear to be taking sides.
If the animist theme brings to mind the animation Princess Mononoke from Japan’s Studio Ghibli, or Tropical Malady and the Cannes-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives by Thai director Apitchatpong Weerasethekul, the film’s style is closer to the ethnographics of Russian director Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Tulpan. If anything, the Chinese film is more visually striking, filled with glorious images, not only of these villagers framed against the cloud-filled landscape, but also the dark interiors of their farmhouses, where steam or smoke perpetually winds its way into dramatic shafts of light coming through cracks in the timber walls.
But Deep in the Clouds is let down by its undisciplined script, which throws its myriad dramatic opportunities into the soup-pot without stirring and cooking them through. I’d guess the project originated from community workshops without being sufficiently worked on before shooting, and while I may be completely mistaken, that at least gives some idea of the way that it plays.
The other problem is Liu Jie’s inability to get his non-professional cast to do anything more subtle or convincing than yell at each other for large amounts of the running time. Wang Puze and Na Zhenye who play the young lovers, are the sole exception, bringing poignancy to the story by following the less-equals-more principle. But ultimately the film is not nearly as rewarding as it should be given the novelty of its geographic setting and the culture it depicts.
