Absolutely Fantastic

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

A very bleak story. Two miners are teaming together to entrap a young teenager, underage if possible, on the run for any reason whatsoever into coming to work with them underground. The mines are managed by bosses who do not want problems. So they have some kind of premium, or contract for the casualties of accidents, 30,000 yuans per dead. The two miners who want to be rich as fast as possible kill the third one as soon as they can, pocket the premium and run away to the next mine, and the next escaping teenager. It is a simple business, and yet it is not that simple. It is dark in the mines and you do not see very well. So one day, circumstances will reshuffle the pack of cards. One of the two will be impatient and the two will end on the wrong side of some road, of some dynamite. And guess who is going to get the money, and the two urns with the ashes? The film is not interesting because of that, because we more or less know what is going to happen. That kind of undertaker's job cannot last very long. What is interesting is the realistic vision of China's industrial and mining areas today. People have to move away from their families to find work. They have to pay for their schooling or the schooling of their children. They also have the opportunity to work whenever they want. Working conditions are hard. Living conditions are hard too. But It is not that long ago that we had the same situation in Europe, and the present situation in China is what we had in Europe at the end of the 1950s or even beginning of the 1960s. It is only in 1968 that the situation really improved in France with a 13% average pay rise in May 1968. It is exactly what is happening in China this year with a minimum 20% hike on the minimum wage all over China, and the more developed a province the higher the hike is. It may create some inflation. It may cause the yuan to go up slightly. It may make exports slightly more difficult. But the country is dynamic enough not to recapture in productivity what they lose in labor cost. They are catching up so fast that we may not even see them overtaking us. And that is the interest of this film. It does not show a bleak situation centering on exploitation, the hardships and suffering of the working class. It centers on what the desire to catch up with wealth may produce in some minds, even may make some become criminals. A society like this one that is growing, as for their industry, at a 13.9% rate may make some dizzy and envious and impatient to reach the object of their dream faster than honestly possible. An interesting film that shows China is also catching up in that industry too.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID

Two men befriend itinerant workers in order get them work in the mines posing as a relative... then they kill them and, as family, claim compensation.After a successful score, the pair find a fresh-faced youth just come from the country and take him under their wing planning to start over again - but their new protégé is a genuine innocent, and their relationship shifts around him until it becomes clear that their plan won't run so smoothly this time around...I've seen this described both as an art-house character drama and as a kind of noir thriller, and while neither description is wrong both ideas of the movie lack something. It's neither - it's just an excellent film.If it's a character drama, it scores: all three central characters are brilliantly played and have the idiosyncratic, sometimes inconsistent feel of real people. You laugh with them and feel for them, even when sometimes you shouldn't.If it's a noir it also scores: bleak, honed to a sharp point and without an ounce of fat on, it's a mesmeric film in which the viewer is compelled to keep watching... in spite of the inescapable feeling that it's not going to end happily.On the other hand, it's visually a world apart from the majority of Chinese art movies. With no music to relieve the realism, it eschews sumptuous visuals in favour of a raw, documentary style which pays off from the first scene, impressing on the viewer the mundane nature of its characters and how chilling simple their plan is.Unlike most noir flicks, it's not overtly a thriller. Events unfold at their own pace, without the careful buildup and the climactic peak of the traditional thriller, and the murder and crime are presented as a part of these men's lives rather than the central subject of the film.The central subject of the film is people, and that's where this film's unique impact lies. Not a film noir and not an art film, this is just a fine film which also happens to be a work of art.

Although many disasters go unreported by mine operators afraid of prosecution, annual deaths in China's coalmines are thought to exceed 10,000. Only last week, 166 miners were killed in a fire in the Chenjiashan Coal Mine in China's Shaanxi Province, a disaster that came shortly after an earlier explosion in Central China in which 148 miners were killed. Local media reports suggest negligence and greed as the causes of the deadly fire at the Chenjiashan mine, specifically by management's pursuit of a year-end bonus for extra-production while failing to take the time to properly ventilate a shaft. Blind Shaft, the savagely humorous first feature by Li Yang, dramatizes conditions in China's mines, making a direct attack on China's headlong dash to capitalism where greed seems more important than human life. Banned in China, the film combines gritty realism with uncompromising social commentary.Adapted from a novel by Liu Qingbang, itinerant coalminers Song Jinming (Li Yixiang) and Tang Zhaoyang (Wang Shuangbao) devise a scheme to extort money from corrupt mine owners by convincing a fellow worker to pose as their relative. When they kill him and fake an industrial accident, they collect the compensation owed to a relative from the more than willing owner, eager to prevent an investigation into his mine's deteriorating condition. Tang is older and more cynical. Song still has plans to live a good life that includes schooling for his teenage son and both dutifully send part of their blood money home to their family, justifying their criminal behavior by saying "China has a shortage of everything except people".Short of money, Tang recruits a naïve sixteen-year old boy, Yuan Fengming (Wang Baoqiang), whom he spots queuing for work in a city square but their carefully laid out plans begin to show cracks. The boy reminds Song of his own son and he develops protective feelings for him. Yuan, whose father may have been killed by the same scam artists, is anxious to find any kind of work to earn enough money to enroll in school and attaches himself to Song who pretends that he is his uncle. The boy, though a runaway out on his own, does not have any street smarts and his innocence is a sharp contrast to the wily scam operators. In his spare time, he reads History textbooks because they are "interesting" and spends his wages (after wiring some home) to buy the two conspirators a chicken, completely unsuspecting what their intentions are.When the two find work in a nearby mine, Tang is eager to get on with the business, but Song keeps putting things off. The two plan to murder the boy but first want to make his last days a bit pleasurable, introducing him to wine, women and song. In a revealing scene at a bar, Song offers to sing a song called "Long live socialism", but he is reminded that the words have now been changed to "The reactionaries were never overcome. They came back with their US dollars, liberating China". Suspense increases until the film turns in an unexpected but deeply rewarding direction. Blind Shaft won the Silver Bear at the 2003 Berlin Film Festival and has received almost unanimous critical praise in the West. It is one of the best films I've seen this year.

This powerful film just took top honors at the Tribeca Film Festival, winning in the category of best narrative feature. All the competitors were first-time feature directors, so don't expect Bertollucci here, but this is a view of working-class Chinese characters that will grip you from start to finish. Thankfully, the programmers at this festival are daring enough to support this film in spite of the Chinese government's ban on it. Let's hope it findsdistribution soon.Why do we love movie gangsters? What is it about the good-badman thatdraws us in to Cagney at his selfish best, or a zillion noir protagonists? All of that is here, and more in the writing, and the low-key acting never threatens to spoil the bleak mood, either. This is DETOUR, PATHS OF GLORY, SWEETSIXTEEN (Ken Loach's latest) territory. The scene where the two miners singkaraoke, wasted with two sex workers in a cheap brothel is enough to make agovernment blacklist and everyone's else's must-see list at the same time.These men have spent their lives being exploited by crooked mine owners andare fighting back in a crude and _extremely_ callous way, and the reserve with which the scene plays out conveys so much more than even the best socialistrealism of Sayles' MATEWAN ever did. (A great film in its' own right, don't get me wrong. But the situations for coal miners depicted in BLIND SHAFT are allthe more sobering since it is contemporary.) Don't sweat the ending of a tale like this. First-time directors should always get a pass on wrapping a film up. If they get the characters across convincingly (and here they do) then what comes in the last reel hardly matters. Gangsters back in the day knew enough to leave a theater before the moral was delivered. The real message is in the body of a film, where the mirror is held up to real life.