ALESSANDRO GAUDIANO
Sunday, September 21, 2014 – 08:07
Red Amnesia is a bold, if unresolved, experiment in cross-genre cinema by the renowned auteur Wang Xiaoshuai, who is mainly known to Western audiences for the 2001 Silver Bear-winning movie, Beijing Bicycles. It is a tale of paranoia, regret, past misdeeds, and retribution, starring an amazing Lu Zhong.
An old woman’s denial
Deng (Lu Zhong) is an old woman who lives alone in Beijing. Her husband has recently passed away, and she wants to be useful to her family and deny her loss. Deng often intrudes on the personal lives of her two sons, whose family life is abruptly disturbed by a series of anonymous phone calls and episodes of stalking.
Red Amnesia starts as an auteur-style mystery thriller, but its trajectory is broken during the middle part of the film, and it wanders between reality and dream before collapsing into a political metaphor during the (weak, dull) finale.
An ambiguous mystery turns into political allegory
Wang Xiaoshuai is one of the most prominent of the so-called “Sixth Generation” of Chinese film-makers. Like most of his peers, he focuses on urban life, youth and cinematic realism. This heritage is very much in evidence in his latest movie, which tackles such themes as the difficult relationship between urban and rural life, the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, and the generation gap.
The main problem with Red Amnesia lies in its director’s style and storytelling. Although his stories remain extremely relevant, Chinese cinema (as well as China itself) has changed a lot during the last 15 years. Wang’s films are still somewhat stuck in the rut of “Chinese realist” cinema that has begun to feel affected and self-referential.
He has tried to innovate. He has attempted to meld art cinema with genre film-making and shifts between mystery and political allegory. But sadly the game is rigged. By negating the openness of the first part of the film and forcing it into an unnecessarily simple track, much of our fascination with Red Amnesia evaporates, and we are left with only the skeleton of a story that we’ve already seen a thousand times.
