Aftershock

Now showing at the AMC Loew’s Village 7 in New York, Aftershock is China’s official submission as best foreign film for the 2010 Academy Awards. Unlike most Chinese movies that play in New York, this is not targeted at Western audiences like Yimou Zhang’s costume dramas, for example. Since director Feng Xiaogang was unabashedly appealing to his countrymen’s tastes, it is essential fare for anybody looking for an unfiltered take on what matters to a Chinese audience. Since Feng is regarded as China’s Stephen Spielberg, this is especially true. Like the American, he knows how to get to peoples’ hearts, even if exploiting melodramatic gimmicks of one sort or another.

In early August 2010, Aftershock became the highest grossing film ever made in China, surpassing The Founding of a Republic, government-backed hagiography on the Chinese Communist Party. Interestingly enough, the top-grossing film remains Avatar.

Aftershock is a very old-fashioned story about the impact of two powerful earthquakes on a fairly typical cross-section of Chinese society. In the opening scene, we see a young husband Daiqiang and wife Yuan Ni and their young son Deng and his twin sister Da in the cab of a truck that belongs to his employer, a local factory.

Driving home on the night of July 28, 1976 on the crowded streets of Tangshan, they are puzzled by a vast swarm of dragonflies streaming toward them in ominous anticipation of the earthquake that would strike later that night. The Tangshan earthquake killed more people than any other in the 20th century. Around 250,000 people died while another 164,000 were severely injured. As might be expected, the buildings were hardly resistant to earthquakes. To some extent, the Chinese government cannot be held totally at fault since the region was not considered susceptible to earthquakes.

Later when the husband and wife are out enjoying the night air in front of their apartment building, they succumb to a randy mood and jump in the back of the truck for lovemaking. Afterward, when they are sleeping, a powerful earthquake ensues. They rush toward their building, which begins to collapse just like all the others on the street.

Daiqiang runs toward the building to rescue their children but falling debris kills him immediately. As Yuan Ni approaches the collapsed building, she can hear her children crying out to her from beneath the rubble. Rescue workers can see them pinned beneath an enormous slab of concrete but can only rescue one of the children. By lifting the slab in one direction to rescue one twin, it will kill the other. They insist that she choose immediately or both will die. Following the male-dominated culture that surrounds her, she chooses that Deng should live.

He survives but loses a hand in the process. Meanwhile, Da, who has been placed next to her dead father in a truck, has only been unconscious. She is brought to an orphanage and adopted by a husband and wife who are in the People’s Liberation Army. For their part, Yuan Ni and Deng remain in Tangshan where they struggle to survive and mourn for the lost father and the presumably dead sister.

The movie follows each child as they suffer from different forms of adjustment. Da goes to medical school but drops out after becoming pregnant. Deng, an indifferent high school student, does not apply to college but becomes one of China’s new entrepreneurs through dint of his personal charm and perseverance.

I don’t think that I am giving away too much of the plot to say that this becomes a story about a family becoming reunited. Although I am as flinty as they come, I was nearly reduced to tears by the end. Oddly enough, the film that this reminds me of more than any is Sansho the Bailiff, a 1954 Japanese masterpiece about the reunion of a mother and her two children, who had been abducted by bandits. In a very real sense, the earthquake serves as the same kind of villain even though it is a natural disaster rather than a human agency. Just minutes after the Tangshan earthquake has taken her husband’s life Yuan Ni yells out “God, you bastard!”

It also reminds me of some I have seen from North Korea, a country that makes some very fine movies despite the iron hand of the dictatorship. If there is one thing you can say about the mixture of Confucianism and state socialism (obviously highly distorted in North Korea’s case, and only a memory in the case of China), there is an obvious commitment to family values, to use the words in their proper meaning rather than in the disgusting way bigots in the U.S use them.

For a very old fashioned but genuinely stirring film, Aftershock is strongly recommended.