The Orphan of Anyang: review by Shelly Kraicer

Reviewed by Shelly Kraicer, September, 2001, as published in Cinema Scope magazine (see below).

Wang Chao’s first feature, The Orphan of Anyang, is simultaneously deeply satisfying and profoundly unnerving — the unexpected result is a film that approaches the sublime. Like the films of He Jianjun, Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai and Zhang Yuan, all of whom graduated from the Beijing Film Academy after the giants of the fifth generation (Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige et al), Orphan focuses on marginal urban characters — criminals, prostitutes, unemployed workers — left behind by China’s rapid urbanization and decollectivization of the 80s and 90s. The film’s rigour, specifically, the way Wang chooses from among a small set of options, and repeats them in a resolutely controlled way, provokes a certain formal pleasure. What is unnerving is Wang’s gambit of folding the most downbeat feeling of urban anomie around a core of ironically distancing humour; his offbeat juxtapositions ask viewers to struggle with the implications of tragedy and comedy in the same scene.

Single and in his 40s, Yu Dagang is a recently unemployed worker who can’t even afford to eat. In a prologue, he listlessly wanders around devastated, postindustrial landscapes; the film’s action begins with his efforts to barter now-useless company ration coupons for cash to buy food. At a noodle stall, he finds an abandoned baby; its mother, Yanli, has left a note promising to pay for the baby’s support. Desperate, Dagang takes it home. Yanli is a prostitute and the desultory girlfriend of Boss Side, a small-time triad boss with a snazzy entourage of sharply dressed goons. After a couple of nearly silent meetings with Yanli at a noodle restaurant, Dagang, originally intending to return the baby, decides not only to keep it, but also to invite Yanli to join this impromptu family. When Boss Side is diagnosed with cancer, he returns to collect the baby, his only heir. A fight with Side leaves Dagang in prison, and Yanli alone with her child. The film ends with her arrest in an anti-prostitution raid: we see her hand the baby to a stranger just before she is arrested, and an epilogue seems to reunite the family, if only in her imagination.

Granted, this doesn’t really sound like the stuff of comedy. But Wang’s method of shooting distances the viewer from the action, lends irony to the characters’ situations and throws the events of the story into unexpected, disorienting contexts. His actors are all nonprofessionals, and, like Bresson, he seems to have coaxed most of them to be as inexpressive as possible. Orphan looks like it was shot using only natural light, completely on location, though this may not have been a choice at all. Without script approval, independent Chinese directors can’t shoot in studios, and as long as they don’t draw undue attention to themselves, they can get away with filming in apartments or on the street: Chinese official surveillance can’t be bothered to notice, much less prohibit, this kind of filmmaking. At most, it will restrict a film’s access to domestic distribution, and can make a director’s subsequent collaboration with state studios and their resources difficult or impossible. [...]

See the full review in the current issue of Cinema Scope: September 2001, issue 8, pp. 19-20 (now online).

back to the index...

Shelly Kraicer
email the website editor