Chongqing Blues

"Don't get me wrong...."

The London Film Festival had a fairly downbeat start for me.  Following the 'Let Me In' cast and director into the Vue West End any celebrity pretensions I may have had were quickly lost with security telling us 'Chongqing Blues' folks not to stand on the red carpet.  I clearly couldn't be less famous if I tried.
 

This sense of the outsider was reflected back to me in Wang Xiaoshuai's sparsely scored film in which an estranged father returns to his past haunts in order to understand the events that lead to his son's death.  Lin Quanhai (Wang Xueqi) wanders the streets, blocked by almost everyone he encounters in his quest to answer questions and find some peace with the loss of his son.  But the fact is he lost his son long before his death and Lin knows this only too well.

 

Chongqing Blues is slow; at times painfully so, and I wasn't entirely convinced that this needed to be the case.  Even at just shy of 2 hours it feels like it could lose a good 10-15 minutes.  It moved from contemplative to ponderous to dragging in the 110 minutes and although the acting deserved the time and attention that it got some parts could have done with moving up a gear - a sequence where Lin follows his son's friend on a night out, for instance, could do with some tightening up.

For a film named after a city it is surprising and intriguing just how little of it we actually see.  We certainly cover a lot of ground; Lin trawling the city of his past as the camera stalks behind him but it is not a film to romanticise the area.  The camera's focus is almost solely Xueqi - his face, hands, and even his back for large periods.  It is a truly claustrophobic film with extended close-ups and shots that present a very limited field of vision around the protagonist.

Wang Xueqi's melancholic almost one-note performance is haunting to watch and he is backed up by some excellent work by Fan Bingbing as the off duty doctor caught up in events and Li Feier as his son's girlfriend.  I particularly appreciated the bravery of scenes in which Lin finally receives some of the answers he desperately wants and the camera is kept away from his face, focusing on the other character or Lin’s back.  Having spent so much of the film studying Xueqi's face Xiaoshuai finally makes us outsiders when it comes to Lin’s breakthroughs.

 

So, all in all, an interesting if downbeat opener for my London Film Festival 2010 experience.  I feel that it was aiming for haunting but dragged a little too much to get there.

6/10