Chongqing Blues (Wang Xiaoshuai, 2010) (Patreon)

Based on the three films of Wang's I've seen, he is a perfectly solid director of unmemorable films. Granted, it must be difficult being the Phil Ochs of the 6th Generation with Jia is your Bob Dylan. But, to be fair, I have not seen Wang's debut film The Days which, I have it on good authority, is a marvel. 

Case in point: Chongqing Blues is a perfectly acceptable Un Certain Regard film that, if memory serves, was initially given a berth in UCR and then later on bumped up to Competition by the brain trust at Cannes. Sure, why not? There's nothing patently bad about it, and it will fill an empty slot without ruffling any feathers. It's the story of Lin (Wang Xueqi), a sea captain who abandoned his family 15 years prior to the film's main action. He returns to the mainland to discover that his adult son Bo (Wang Ziyi in flashbacks) committed a violent, very public crime and was killed by police. Lin then spends the rest of the film going around to everyone associated with Bo and the crime, to ask them to explain what happened and why.

The film follows a leisurely investigatory pace, but is troubled by the fact that our point of identification is a man who, we and others recognize, has no inherent right to the information he seeks. And he is frequently callous and intrusive in the manner he goes about seeking said information, disrupting lives that had already been returning to some normalcy. 

In addition to Lin's own obvious journey -- the regretful absent father trying to reckon with what his departure wrought in the lives he left behind -- there is also a fairly clear allegorical dimension to Chongqing Blues. The old man is frequently sticking out like a sore thumb around young people, calling them "comrade," looking befuddled by modern China. He can be seen pretty readily as a covert stand-in for the Party, an old man "lost at sea" who is several paces behind the lived experience of real Chinese citizens. For his part, he keeps dragging them back into the past.

Wang is even careful to capture the urban grime and smoggy haze of Chongqing in his cinematography. So yes, Chongqing Blues is a perfectly acceptable art film, even if its conclusion -- giving us the entire story that had been so carefully withheld throughout -- is a bit patronizing. There's nothing wrong with this film. But I will probably forget about it by next week.