Director: Yinze Li
Writer: Xiyang Deng
Cast: Ma Qiang, Huang Xuan
Running time: 25 mins
A while ago, reviewing Wanti Liu’s short narrative Lost Father, I pointed out the pitfalls awaiting anyone commenting on films produced in China under Xi Jinping’s increasingly dictatorial regime. Fortuitously, Yinze Li’s Below the River, avoids the pitfalls. The movie gives us a broad-brush picture of job insecurity, overcrowded housing and urban development that is regrettably transferrable to almost any industrial or post-industrial society – nothing for the Communist Party’s disciplinarians to get too wound up about. It will also be welcome to the Party that Below the River is a morality tale where the main protagonists ask themselves what the right ethical course of action is they should take and where the audience is asked to consider the proposition that Money Isn’t Everything.
Director Li is with the Hebei University of Media and Communications and Below the River is the result of collaborative work between faculty and students from the University. The movie was made on location in Dujiangyan, south-western China. Dujiangyan is a ‘county level’ city – small beer in Chinese human geography – but with over 600,000 souls it is just over triple the size of my home city in the UK. China is Big.
The eponymous river is the Min Jiang, a tributary of the Yangtse, which flows through the centre of Dujiangyan. The city lies where the river reaches the plain after cascading down from its source in the Min mountains. The Min are part of the great Himalayan massif – the Roof of the World. The forest covered mountains provide an evocative natural backdrop to the cityscape – a fine location for moviemaking.
Yinze Li and their team have put together a competent effort – Below the River looks good, the cinematography and editing are fine, the two lead actors put in strong performances, and the plotline rattles along and packs a lot of narrative into the twenty-five minute running time. And, yet, for your reviewer, Below the River came across as a curiously unambitious movie.
The film portrays a short time in the lives of a married couple: Ma, played by Ma Qiang, and Huiling, played by Huang Xuan. Ma drives a taxi and Huiling sells second-hand clothing online. Although not in abject poverty, the couple are pretty near the bottom of the economic heap – life is a struggle. In some of the film’s most engaging scenes, the director takes us into the family home. We discover the couple have a male child and that Ma’s mother lives with them. Home is an old wooden apartment block and here Yinze Li captures the pressures of overcrowding on family life in fine detail – the marital bed appears to be in a broom cupboard.
The script by Xiyang Deng is efficient. The storyline maps out the tensions that the effects of poverty and overcrowding have brought to the couple’s relationship. In a trope that seems a common concern in many contemporary Chinese films, the filmmakers address the issue of the care of the elderly – Huiling wants Ma to put his mother in a care home.
The movie’s central plot device is that Ma miraculously finds a holdall stuffed full of pristine banknotes which a customer has left on the back seat of the taxi. If I am reincarnated, I would opt to come back to life as taxi driver in a movie as I am sure I would always find a bag full of cash in my cab.
Once Ma finds the money, the director chooses a thriller/police procedural mode, and we see Ma’s attempts at tracing the owner and then Ma’s growing realisation that all the family’s problems might be solved by keeping the cash and using it to buy a new apartment where they might all live together happily ever after. Ma’s dilemma is that Huiling believes that keeping the money will bring bad luck and repeatedly urges him to do the right thing and hand the money over to the police thus losing the possibility of economic advancement. Adding another dimension to the narrative, is a sub-plot that Ma starts to suspect that Huiling is having an affair.
I enjoyed the performances of both Ma Qiang and Huang Xuan. For me, the movie’s standout scene is where Huiling tries to make a social media promotional video to sell her second-hand clothes. Huang Xuan plays the part superbly. She attempts the delusional self-confidence so essential for the social influencer and fails abysmally – we get her self-realisation that she is just an ordinary diffident human being trying to sell a not particularly attractive bunch of old clothes to a world full of strangers on the internet. Very well done, indeed.
Yinze Li ties the narrative threads together effectively and then provides us with a final twist aimed at discombobulating the audience and confounding our expectations.
The filmmakers got a lot of things right in the making of Below the River but there were a few aspects that did not work for you reviewer – although some of these might be due to the dissonance between the expectations of a Chinese domestic audience and those of a global audience.
The turn. I felt the depiction of the twist at the end was overly hurried and the decision to leave the audience in suspense was ill-judged. At this point in the thriller genre, the viewer wants closure not the opening up of more questions – the final scene came across to me as silly.
The landscape. As Ma goes about his business driving the taxi through the city, we get the occasional shots of the river and the city streets. However, the treatment of the cityscape was where I felt the movie lacked ambition. I would have thought that the decision to film the production in Dujiangyan with its particularly striking location possibilities would have prompted the moviemakers to be more adventurous in their take on the world outside Ma’s cab. Whereas all we get is a single shot of a forested mountain side. Also lacking is any attempt to portray the sheer scale and spectacle of the newly developed cityscape. Although, in the latter case this might be just too obvious and boring to a domestic audience, the world we live in in these times, and possibly the filmmakers thought it would detract from the dynamics of the central narrative.
The soundtrack. There is a disclaimer in the credits that reads: the music in the film comes from the internet and does not involve any commercial purpose. Fair enough. Most of the music is innocuous instrumental mood music which might be AI generated and works quite well in the movie’s setting. However, right near the start of the movie, the choice of music proves disastrous.
The opening scene has Ma driving his cab through an empty tunnel and as he emerges onto the city street, we catch the opening chords of a song that an international audience will be wearily familiar with.
There are two problems here. The song is Hotel California, and its rendition is an internet cover version by a not overly adept group of musicians. The issue with Hotel California is that over the last fifty years it has leached into the global consciousness as a leitmotif of cocaine fuelled, hedonistic anomie. An international audience will be trying to connect the song with Ma’s situation in Below the River – and will fail to do so – leaving them non-plussed. The issue with the use of the cover version is that most of the, again, international audience will remark how bad the singer is. Whatever one thinks about Don Henley’s moral compass, the Eagles were consummate vocalists – as West Coast white boyband singers they were up there with the Beach Boys. As the cover version played, like me, most of a global audience would simply be distracted and puzzled.
The lesson here is for filmmakers to be extremely careful when they cross cultures when choosing soundtrack music – a rule of thumb being that if you stick to instrumental music, you should not usually go too far wrong. But even so, thinking on it, in these times The Great Gate of Kiev might be problematic.
There was only one production glitch in Below the River that I caught. As this is a university production, the cast are in the main students. The problem here is that they are impossibly young for the parts they play – Ma’s mother really does not look old enough to go into an old people’s home and the uniformed doorperson at a hotel looks as they have emerged from a junior school playground.
On the cultural aspects of the movie, I had a concern, and it is not particular to Below the River, as it is a common theme to movies across the world and from different cultures – the othering of crime and deviance. In Below the River, one of the characters turns out to be a drug dealer and, of course, it turns out they are South Korean. Oh, for filmmakers to take some pride in home grown criminality.
Small glitches and soundtrack nightmare aside, Yinze Li has given us a movie full of interest and which largely fulfils the goal they set out to explore. It sums up many of the tensions and stresses which face Chinese workers – and indeed workers across the globe – struggling to make ends meet in the gig economy tied to their phone screens as our ancestors were tied to the plough.
I hope the school at Hebei continue to submit work to IFL – I would be eager to see what they come up with in the future. And for IFL readers outside of China, try and catch this movie if you hear it’s part of a festival programme near you. Below the River is a pacey twenty-five minutes of cinema and eminently watchable. As a piece of storytelling, the movie gave me an insight into the lived experience of one family caught up in perhaps the most momentous and rapid change any society has undergone in human history. China is Big, and is a Big Story.