Blind Shaft (2003)

Too much of everything

Good movie but grossly overrated

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Two men befriend itinerant workers in order get them work in the mines posing as a relative... then they kill them and, as family, claim compensation.After a successful score, the pair find a fresh-faced youth just come from the country and take him under their wing planning to start over again - but their new protégé is a genuine innocent, and their relationship shifts around him until it becomes clear that their plan won't run so smoothly this time around...I've seen this described both as an art-house character drama and as a kind of noir thriller, and while neither description is wrong both ideas of the movie lack something. It's neither - it's just an excellent film.If it's a character drama, it scores: all three central characters are brilliantly played and have the idiosyncratic, sometimes inconsistent feel of real people. You laugh with them and feel for them, even when sometimes you shouldn't.If it's a noir it also scores: bleak, honed to a sharp point and without an ounce of fat on, it's a mesmeric film in which the viewer is compelled to keep watching... in spite of the inescapable feeling that it's not going to end happily.On the other hand, it's visually a world apart from the majority of Chinese art movies. With no music to relieve the realism, it eschews sumptuous visuals in favour of a raw, documentary style which pays off from the first scene, impressing on the viewer the mundane nature of its characters and how chilling simple their plan is.Unlike most noir flicks, it's not overtly a thriller. Events unfold at their own pace, without the careful buildup and the climactic peak of the traditional thriller, and the murder and crime are presented as a part of these men's lives rather than the central subject of the film.The central subject of the film is people, and that's where this film's unique impact lies. Not a film noir and not an art film, this is just a fine film which also happens to be a work of art.

I just saw this at the Pan African Film Festival where it was curated in conjunction with Visual Communications in a cross-cultural viewing. Bravo for that foresight.And bravo for selecting BLIND SHAFT. Is it a masterpiece? No. What it is is a very solid piece of film-making. In basketball terms, it isn't Magic Johnson, it's James Worthy.Rather than go into the plot, which everyone seems wont to do on these boards, I think it's much more helpful to talk about films in terms of their elements. Plot you can get anywhere, such as Ebert.The story is a simple morality tale. Nuff said. What's standout about this movie is the ACTING - some of the best, particularly by the youngster that plays the young boy. He is super. The two principles and extended cast are solid as well.Which points toward director Li Yang who flexes assured muscles throughout. Nothing fancy - no super montages or MTV fancy shmancy technique. In fact, the lighting is uniformly flat throughout, with a decidedly blue cast to connote the frigid brisk air. That's it.It's also marked by the absence of a soundtrack.BLIND SHAFT is a return to film-making of a Bressonian order, but with actors, not "models" as Bresson called them. It is a simple tale, but told in such a straight-ahead honest manner, it stands in stark contrast to the contrived machinations of the Hollywood puke machine that spews out "packages" like clockwork.See this movie if you want bare-knuckle, honest film-making. Skip it if you want Brett Ratner window dressing from Hollywood - it's not for you then.

Song and Tang are two conmen who make their money through murder and deception. They live among the unemployed drifters of China, latch onto lonely young men, convince them to pretend to be one of their relatives and then the three get a job together in a mine. After a few days, Song and Tang kill their companion and make it look like a cave in - extorting the bosses for compensation in return for silence. They have been doing this for a while to good profit and plan to continue when they pick up the sixteen year old Yuan, creating a moral crisis for Song.I was not sure what this film was about when I sat to watch it but the fact that it had been made as an underground film (literally) without the permission of the Government and that was enough reason for me to give it a bit of my time. As one would expect from such a film, the plot is a mix of narrative and comment. The comment is delivered in the form of us seeing the working conditions and the poverty `enjoyed' by the citizens who are outside of what we would consider the `proper' economic system. In this regard the film is interesting if not totally gripping. The narrative is just as gripping but it is less satisfying as it seems to be secondary to the other aspects of the film. The characters do just enough to carry the story along, in fact they win over the audience well enough for us to care about all the main players - essential in a film that is driven more by them than by action.To that end, the cast (a mix of professionals and non-professionals) deliver the goods pretty well. Yuan's innocence and dedication to the characters is key to the film and Wang carries this off well. The elder Wang is also good but has a simpler character to deliver - however it is to his credit that his `bad' guy never lost my interest. Li is the best thing in the film even if he goes through an fairly recognisable crisis of confidence. Yang Li's documentary background shows through with the realistic direction and the great use of locations - all the more impressive as many of them must have been difficult to shoot in.However, the lack of events means that the narrative is a little less than satisfying when it comes to the end. We more or less know where it is going and the film uses the ending as much as a closure to the narrative as it is a further comment of the people's place within the system. Despite this it is still worth seeing even if it may not match the hype that the awards and reviews on this page would have you believe. Overall a good film that is worthy with good direction and acting even if the commentary of society and narrative don't sit as well together as one would hope.

This powerful film just took top honors at the Tribeca Film Festival, winning in the category of best narrative feature. All the competitors were first-time feature directors, so don't expect Bertollucci here, but this is a view of working-class Chinese characters that will grip you from start to finish. Thankfully, the programmers at this festival are daring enough to support this film in spite of the Chinese government's ban on it. Let's hope it findsdistribution soon.Why do we love movie gangsters? What is it about the good-badman thatdraws us in to Cagney at his selfish best, or a zillion noir protagonists? All of that is here, and more in the writing, and the low-key acting never threatens to spoil the bleak mood, either. This is DETOUR, PATHS OF GLORY, SWEETSIXTEEN (Ken Loach's latest) territory. The scene where the two miners singkaraoke, wasted with two sex workers in a cheap brothel is enough to make agovernment blacklist and everyone's else's must-see list at the same time.These men have spent their lives being exploited by crooked mine owners andare fighting back in a crude and _extremely_ callous way, and the reserve with which the scene plays out conveys so much more than even the best socialistrealism of Sayles' MATEWAN ever did. (A great film in its' own right, don't get me wrong. But the situations for coal miners depicted in BLIND SHAFT are allthe more sobering since it is contemporary.) Don't sweat the ending of a tale like this. First-time directors should always get a pass on wrapping a film up. If they get the characters across convincingly (and here they do) then what comes in the last reel hardly matters. Gangsters back in the day knew enough to leave a theater before the moral was delivered. The real message is in the body of a film, where the mirror is held up to real life.