Celluloid hills
In Jia Zhangke's Golden Palm-winning Still Life, the leading character arrives in the Three Gorges area in search of his estranged wife. When he locates the place in his address book, not only is she nowhere in sight, but the place itself is gone, torn down to make way for submergence. Adding to the complexity, locals told him it is no longer part of Sichuan Province, but of Chongqing Municipality.
For outsiders like this character, Sichuan and Chongqing are hard to separate from each other. They share the same dialect and cuisine. But ever since Chongqing gained municipality status ten years ago, it is thrusting its presence into public consciousness.
This is helped by a spate of recent movies that use Chongqing as their backdrop, displaying a rich tapestry of sceneries that characterize this hilly city. The screen Chongqing is a contrast of old and new, of earthy and glamorous, and of things that never change and things in constant change. To a certain extent, it is shaping public perception of this unique municipality the size of Austria.
Chongqing may be a film location scout's dream. Contributing to its sharp screen persona is a downtown with multi-leveled skyscrapers built on a hilly terrain, an elevated metro system, one mighty river running into another, aerial tramways gliding across the rivers, glitzy riverfront boulevard and boutique stores, and a vast rural area of breathtaking beauty.
Modern metropolis
Ironically, the most prominent movie with the city's name in the title has nothing to do with it. Hong Kong auteur Wong
Stone steps in Chongqing offers the producers of Curiosity Kills A Cat timeless charm. File Photo |
The film that renewed public consciousness of Chongqing on the map of celluloid China is last year's sleeper hit Crazy Stone. This low-budget heist movie not only uses the city as its only location, but has most of the characters speaking the local dialect.
Crazy Stone has an urban yet down-to-earth look. It features streets and shops that are so mundane and taken for granted that some locals were unhappy about the absence of the emerging glitz. Since the plot revolved around a bunch of dim-witted thieves, they also felt it was a little disparaging.
On the other end of the spectrum is Curiosity Kills a Cat, directed by local boy Zhang Yibai, which highlights the lifestyle of the high class. With the story's first half ostensibly following Fatal Attraction and the second half a multi-perspective retelling, the thriller features a high-society couple and their kid living in a penthouse overlooking downtown Chongqing. Everything is cosmopolitan, as if the city is an inland equivalent of Shanghai, only with more steps to climb.
Just when you thought Chongqing could not be made trendier, along came Li Shaohong's Door, a supernatural horror flick that seems to take place in a daze. Outside the protagonist's window is the elevated rail line with speedy trains whizzing by, yet not emitting any noise. It takes a while for one to pinpoint the location as Chongqing. The movie stars Chen Kun, a Chongqing native, even though he eschews his dialect.
Chongqing's cross-river cable car is used for many films including last year's big hit Crazy Stone. File Photo |
Chongqing likes to position itself as the gateway to the country's Western hinterland. However, its first Cinderella moment in modern history happened during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-45), when the Nationalist government retreated and made Chongqing its temporary capital. Artists of every genre flocked to the city, creating a cultural boom before dispersing back to coastal cities like Beijing and Shanghai when the war ended.
Some 15 features and 100 documentaries were made during this period. Lack of film stock and good equipment put a strain on regular production. Even a 1942 Hollywood war film, Lady from Chungking, starring the indomitable Anna May Wong, shifted its focus to this Chinese city, using it as a symbol of resistance and bravery. But those were dwarfed by several high-profile films and television series about the war, produced in the post-war era, which shaped Chongqing into a psychological, if not visual, mode.
The Communist Party, which collaborated with the Nationalists during the War, also has an abundance of Chongqing-based stories, for example, Zhou Enlai's work in the city and Mao Zedong's negotiation with Chiang Kai-shek in the aftermath of the war.
But the story that gained a life of its own took place in the run-up to the 1949 Liberation. It tells of a group of underground Communists who were imprisoned in a notorious jail and then killed when the Nationalists retreated. Fictionalized in the best-selling Red Crag, the movie version enthralled filmgoers for generations. The real locations
The Luohan Temple in downtown Chongqing is the center stage of Crazy Stone. |
Charming countryside
Wide swaths of the municipality are rural. The relocation of the soon-to-be-flooded towns in the Three Gorges is captured by Jia Zhangke and a documentary called Yan Mo, which won multiple awards, while the bamboo forests in suburban Yongchuan County provided center stage for the climax scene in Zhang Yimou's martial arts fantasy House of Flying Daggers.
Zhang's latest epic, Curse of the Golden Flower, was shot on a Beijing soundstage and a Zhejiang production base, but it has one location, Heaven's Pit in Wulong, another Chongqing suburb, where a platoon of pursuers glide down from heaven with no help from computer touchup. Although these films are worlds apart in style, they bring the whole country to the attention of Chongqing's scenic diversity.
Chongqing is one of the major Chinese cities that does not have its own film studio. In former times, film crews were reluctant to shoot there because they had to lug tons of equipment from outside. Nowadays, they almost elbow their way into the city, each trying to outdo the others in representing the city or a facet of it. There are currently several more productions working on location there.
Despite the enthusiasm of filmmakers, a quintessentially Chongqing film has not yet been made. But it is foreseeable, if not already a fact, that Chongqing is turning into the fourth Chinese city - after Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong - that the film camera has fallen in love with.
The downtown with its towering highrises can be seen across the Yangtze River. Photos by Jiang Dong |
(China Daily 06/21/2007 page24)
