I had one hour to get from “gog” to “Ciao Ciao” and afterwards I had to run home to attend a family outing, so this was a pretty stressful day up to that point. Thankfully the rest of the evening was nice (and had good food unlike the Saturday before) so this was actually the most pleasant of the social obligations I had to attend during this Berlinale.
Ciao Ciao
China/France 2017, Song Chuan, 83′
After returning to her Yunnan hometown from Guangzhou, Ciao Ciao gets stuck in a marriage that quickly bores her while she gets close to hairdresser who claims to be from Guangzhou.
OK let’s get over this quickly. This was the worst movie I have seen this Berlinale, and it may in fact be the worst movie I have seen in all Berlinales I have ever attended. I could tell that the film would piss me off since the first 30 seconds, when you saw an overly saturated landscape (so green that it hurt your eyes, and the exact opposite of the pretty green you see in “Mushishi” or, to keep it within the Berlinale, “Honeygiver among the dogs”) accompanied by amazingly terrible Chinese techno music.
The techno music was present throughout the story, and so was the terribleness. The characters are stupid, their actions are inexplicable, their sex scenes cringe-worthy almost to the point of disgustingness and the storyline is absolutely unengaging. The dialogue contains tidbits like “if you love me, you have to give me big gifts, that’s what a man is supposed to do”, and portrays a despicable lower farming class. If I were a farmer in Yunnan, I’d be utterly pissed at how I was being represented in this film: lazy, greedy, treacherous and sex-crazed.
Loris was more forgiving towards “Ciao Ciao” and essentially said that he didn’t get the film, but in my opinion that the film was just so crappy that whatever was incomprehensible about it (like the characters’s motives) was due to the fact that the film failed to make sense. If anything the film serves as a reminder that the bad Chinese films are out there, and how infuriatingly bad they are.