The High Life (尋歡作樂)

My fourth HKIFF film, The High Life (尋歡作樂) is an adventure in more senses than one. I rushed to a cinema the true locoation of which I had been misdirected by three security guards and a shop keeper. One said it was outside of Langham Place on the ground floor. Another said it was on the 8th floor and I was directed to wrong lift! When I arrived at Langham Place, it was already 9.40 p.m.. I only realized I had to go when one of the girls in the Spanish class in Wanchai asked for permission to leave early for an appointment. That rang a bell. I had to go a movie too! Anyway, after much misadventure, I finally managed to grab the first seat next to the cinema entrance to "enjoy" this fourth  movie by Zhao Dayong (趙 大勇) and his first feature film, done within half a year in 2009.

 

I did not know what happened before I arrived. When I looked at the screen after quickly settling into my seat, I saw three men talking under over a sofa beside a small low table under some dim reddish light  in  some kind of restaurant nightclub. They were talking mostly in mandarin but sometimes in Cantonese about a certain joint enterprise. They talked in veiled terms. The only things that mattered according to a bald headed Hong Kong man, in a suit without tie, was that they should earn some money so that the other could get some girls. Shortly thereafter, we see a girl's head lying on the neck and breast of another man under a cheap looking quilt on a bed with some tasteless bedsheet. At the side of the bed was a small metal and plastic table serving as bedside table with an electric fan and a ready to drink plastic bottled water. It looked like a makeshift bedroom. The girl was snuggled against the man, looking up to him but the man was smoking and appeared deep in thought. Then he got up to a roof, wore a Beijing opera robe with a dragon pattern at its back and stepped to and fro with hand gestures of that of a Beijing opera male character, tracing measured stage steps peculiar to that kind of opera. After that he leant on a parapet and looked listlessly around. There were some noises from a window in the building across his own. He saw the shape of a woman shouting. She was saying that if the man, invisible from that window, were not to marry her, then she would find another who would support her. We did not hear the man's reply. The woman finally shouted that she would leave and would take the car, the house and the money, everything. Then suddenly everything became quiet. Had the man yielded?

 

In the next scene, we see an all-girl "hair salon". The man was being served by a teenage girl who messaged his shoulders and upper back and asked him if he felt good. He said very good. There were other customers, but not many. It was a small hair salon at the end of a narrow alley,with cheap semi-transparent plastic as a kind of protective "door" to the entance, the kind that you sometimes find on "cheapie" neighborhood wun tun noodle shop. Everything is visible from the alley where the camera was placed, some 30 to 40 feet away. There were prices written in red Chinese characters on one side of the shop entrance where a yellow and white cylinder was rotating lazily. The sides of the alley had dirty brick walls, metal postboxes, signboards all over the place. At its corner was a small stall selling cigarettes, softdrinks etc. The barber shop was bathed in a yellowish glare. The alley was quite narrow, hardly more than 5 or 6 feet across. It felt suffocating. It felt boxed in. I  had the urge to go out of the theatre there and then but I resisted the temptation. The film rolled on. We next see the man teaching the girl how to play a video game on a sofa inside the hair salon. The girl seemed all excited with this new toy. The bald headed man then entered and expected to be served. He was served by the young girl. Soon, he began to touch her and drag her into a room inside, against her will. The first man bought some cigarettes at the corner store and waited. The camera seemed to have assumed the eyes of the waiting man. We hear some off screen screams of the girl asking the man not to do whatever it was that he was doing and then some more screams. They were screams of pain. In the next scene, we see some shadows rushing quickly across the screen. The next shot was the bald headed man lying on the ground, blood oozing from his head.We next see him in a nightclub again,  a bandage over the place where he was hit, being served by two ladies and drinking. His local protector was around. He was complaining about the ineffectiveness of their service.

 

In the next scene, we see the first man talking to her girl friend. She was asking to be taken away too. He said she was fine where she was. She said it was not fine at all and insisted on leaving. He asked her to move slightly so that he can step on to the stool where she was sitting so that he could hang his Beijing opera robe properly on the wall. She refused to budge. He tried to nudge her off the stool. She would not be moved.  She was angry that the man did not listen to her. She said she would leave. The man asked her where she would go to. She was silent. The man had to find some alternative support for his feet. He managed to do what he wanted and carefully smoothed the wrinkles on her royal robe. To relieve himself, he walked as if he were on stage with his Beijing opera robe in a corner of the room when no one was looking.

 

Then we see the man siting on a stool inside a dingy looking "classroom" with nothing but a "whiteboard on a stand.". A man in his mid-30s was giving a lecture on how to sell a $6,800.00 investment product to more and more purchasers under a pyramid sale racket. He was expounding eloquently in mandarin on the magic of 7  times 7 times 7 etc. and how much money the girls could make and periodically praised their intelligence by asking them simple questions and boosting the self-confidence of the 20 or so eager looking young girls sitting cheek by jowl ,on some stools and seemed utterly convinced by the simplicity, the beauty, the feasibility and its "magical" power to earn them a quick buck in the shortest possible time. However, suddenly the police busted in and all were taken to the local the local police station. The first young man was also arrested. He was asked to remove his clothes before detention. He sheepishly hid his dick and was jeered by the two police officers. One of them asked him his educational level. He said primary. He was asked if he could read. He said a little. Then a small book was opened and two words were pointed out to him to test his knowledge. He was able to read, "Little hole". He was asked to read the entire page. The man looked at the page for a while. But said he did not know how to read. He was jeered that he looked a cultured person but could not read and he appeared so ashamed of showing his dick that he probably never laid any broad and might still be a "virgin".  After he was gone, the two policemen made a bet as to how long it would be before he would open his mouth to make a confession. The winner would get a meal. Then the camera showed us the man being put into a room for solitary confinement. Out of boredom, he practised his Beijing opera walk! Then we are shown some other female innates, who were all engaged in reading some poetry or other. Some of such poems were recited by one female innate to another as a kind of exercise. In the meantime, we see one of the interrogators talking to prisioner No. 58 through the prison bar.  He said she felt bored and asked for cigarette. She was given one. He kit it for her. She was asked why she came down to Shenzen. She said she wanted to make some quick money to send her sister to the South Western University of Political Science and Law. She was asked if she liked the poetry she was given to read. She said she genuinely loved some of them. Then she was asked what her dream would be. She said to be a policeman. Then she said she had a little favor to ask. He asked her what it was. She said it would be her birthday in two days time and how she wanted to put on some lipstick that day. Two days later, The policeman brought her the lipsticks. She asked that he put it on her lips. He did so, carefully. But he was not allowed this peace of mind. A female internee had escaped. He was given by his superior, who knew about his peculiar method of requiring the innates to recite his "poetry", two days to locate her. When the film ended, he was seen looking about the Shenzhen railways station amongst the assorted crowds milling around, with and without luggage in their hands, all hurrying to go somewhere. What was the mad rush about?.

 

In many ways, this is an unusual film. It told he peculiar story of this monster metropolis called Shenzhen, the first city in China to be "modernized". It brought a rash of modern buildings, industries, trade and commerce and the corresponding "entertainment "industries of karaokes, nightclubs with psychedelic lightning and deafening booms of cheap speakers spewing the latest pop songs and dizzing rhythms in booze and retail sex . It was the first city where people from other parts of China could buy fashion, gadgets from Hong Kong. Many girls from all parts of China went to Shenzhen, with just one simple ambition. to make a lot of money in a short time and then returned to their native village.They came from the countryside in Quangdong, Quangxi, Szechuan, Hunan, Kweizhou, even northern China. They had little to sell except their bodies and their youth. The two male heroes of the movie lived on that. The prostitution businsess was protected by the police. The other hero lived on misleading the young female hopefuls. He's a pimp. Both sought to relieve their guilt by playing another role: the pimp by imagining himself to be a king in a make-belief Beijing Opera and the policeman by distancing himself as a poet, writing dirty and semi-literate poetry depicting the evil, the putrefaction and the courrption he was drowned in day in day out in the kind of show case arrest he made. 

 

At the end of the movie, the director and the actor and actress made an appearance and audience were allowed to ask some questions. One young man asked the director why the hero was so concerned about the Beijng opera robe. The director told him to think why. He said if he could not tell, there was no point of hm telling him. I noticed that in the film, the director had often filmed that part of Shenzhen from the height, not a terrible height but just the height of the rooftop of the building where the pimp did his walkabout in his Beijing opera robe. I note also that he picked on that tiny dark alley whose unevenly paved surface reflected a kind of lurid light from the surrounding red light upon its wet and dark surface. To me, that might be the director;s impression of Shenzhen. So I asked him if that was how he felt about Shenzen. He said that was right.  That was the human price Shenzhen had to pay for its "modernization"! He said the writer of the "junk poetry" was in fact none other than the actor who played the "police officer" who asked others to recite his poetry at the police station 沈紹裘. The director said that all the actors were in fact amateurs and he spent less than $0.4 million on the production, all inclusive!!! I like the inonical and tragic tension between the world of reality and dream,  substance and form, of moral and political corruption and its contorted expression in the kind of "junk" poetry of the film, which serves both to insulate its writer from and to embody this topsy turvy world which is Shenzhen!..