After years of not having been there, I finally saw the Friedrichstadt-Palast from the inside again. Last time I was probably a little girl, accompanying my parents to see a regular show there. The interior is pretty much exactly what I expected – kind of dark and outdated looking, with many many inconvenient seats at terrible angles at the screen.
The good about seeing “Tui Na” in the morning is that not so many people were there, and I got a pretty good seat. On the last day, 45 minutes before screening there were huge lines going all the way down the stairs because people knew how early you had to get there to catch the few reasonable seats. However, I sat further to the side twice (for “Chiisai Ouchi” and “La belle et la bete”) and I didn’t think it was that bad – both films were suspenseful enough for me to ignore the bad angle.
Tui Na
China/France 2014, Lou Ye, 114’
Xiao Ma was in a car accident which killed his mother and made him blind. When he grew older, he attended a school for blind children and got educated in doing massages. Shortly after, he joins a massage practice run almost entirely by blind people and falls in love with another colleague’s fiancé. A complicated love polygon with many, many sides ensues.
Death count: I forgot, but I think it was 0.
To be honest, “Tui Na” is perhaps the hardest title to blog right after “Calvary”. There are few films in the entire festival that I wanted to love more than this one, yet it is one of the hardest to love.
First of all, I must mention that I loved “Suzhou River” to pieces. On a superficial level, the two films seem to have nothing in common, but if you think about it, both are about rather obsessive relationships. Strangely enough, however, “Tui Na”’s strength does not lie in these relationships (it’s a pretty generic A and B are a couple, C is in love with B, D is in love with C, E is in love with D story), but rather in the unique choice of blind characters. Everybody of relevance in the film is blind, and the film contemplates the consequences of being blind with a certain thoughtfulness. The voice-over says a lot of somewhat philosophical things about being blind, and while it sounded like ramblings at times, I got the impression that much of it actually made sense. In the story itself, we see many aspects of these blind people’s daily lives and their struggles with the world full of people who can see. We are dealing with a protagonist who tries to kill himself over his blindness at the beginning of the film, and never laughs until the end where his laughing face is the last shot of the film. I thought it was a cute way to show that he was finally able to find happiness, which brings me to the cinematography. I understand why the cinematography of the film received a Silver Bear for it, because it is certainly unique and made a big impression on me. However, I am not sure what this particular cinematography is trying to transmit, artful as it may be. Essentially, we often see shots in which filters and other methods are used to make our vision of the world blurry or generally difficult to see. But that looks nothing like what a blind person sees, right? Even someone whose vision is very bad most likely sees the world differently than what this camera work suggests. So the cinematography can only be understood as figurative at best, and I thought that was rather odd because everything else in the film is rather literal.
The bold choice to make a movie about blind people, and treat their condition with seriousness, is one which I applaud, hence my desire to love the film. But then there is the story itself, and I couldn’t quite get behind it. The character’s feelings seem unmotivated even when keeping in mind that love doesn’t really make sense, most of them had no chemistry with each other whatsoever I had a hard time getting into the characters and caring for them in any other way besides feeling a certain degree of pity. Furthermore, did the main character really have to get saved by a prostitute? Judging from “Suzhou River”, this seems to be an idea the director really likes – the prostitute as an angel. Finally, the worst aspect of the film – and here it seriously bothered me – were those gratuitous sex scenes. You can make a decent love story without all that provocative panting disguised as passionate love, but Chinese directors these days seem to think they are not cool unless they put in some graphic sex.
All in all, I thought “Tui Na” was worthwhile to see, and definitely gives a fresh perspective on the art of film-making and draws attention to an unusual topic. But it may not have been the most enjoyable story to watch in the world.