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| Fang Deeng (Zhang Jingchu) in Aftershock |
China's choice
By John Esther
Long on melodrama, short on very impressive special effects, China's Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film, Aftershock, offers a wallop of both.
The film opens with a pretty impressive scene of dragonflies flying through the air and out of town. They seem to know what is about to go down. A Chinese family watches in amazement as the dragonflies flee.
Once home in the city of Tageshan, Aftershock immediately establishes the family dynamic. The parents are hard working, simple Chinese folk just making it through the world. They have two children, twins. Fang Da (Li Chen) is a bit of weakling, letting his sister, Fang Deeng (Zhang Jingchu), fight his battles. A cooling fan is a luxury.
As the parents finish their business in the back of their truck, the ground begins to shake, shake and shake. It is the 1976 earthquake of Tangshan and for what seemed a good five minutes on screen, thousands and thousands of people are crushed under the weight of unstable buildings. Other things fall, streets crack, people jump out of windows only to be crushed by the building behind them. There is a crane coming undone. There is a pit in my stomach. Imagine the intense, loud, chaotic scene in Ron Howard's, oops, Oliver Stone's World Trade Center where the tower collapses on the firemen and magnify that by ten and you start to get the picture.
It is pretty gut wrenching, especially if you live in the city of Los Angeles where we anticipate the inevitable big one. It does not help that the film's sound shakes the theater walls.
When the rubble starts clearing, the mother, Li Yuanni (Xan Fan), has to make a "Sophie's Choice" between which buried child to choose to live. She picks one, but unbeknown the other hears her mother's choice. To compound the drama, the unpicked child survives unbeknown to the mother and other child.
Jumping over the next 32 years, until the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, each of the surviving members suffers in his or her post-traumatic vein. To keep the saga going, Aftershock incorporates a bombastic music score, multiple tropes of lost chances, and numerous crying scenes.
The highest grossing Chinese film in China's history, for well over two hours, director Xiaogang Feng's Aftershock offers up plenty of emotions. The problem is that the earthquake scene is so powerful the rest of the film incrementally becomes anticlimactic to the point one wishes it would speed up to its predictable conclusion.
(Aftershock screens Jan. 14, 10:30 a.m., Camelot Theatres. For more information: Aftershock)
