At a certain point, late in the film, A Marble Travelogue, a Greek man explains to a Chinese woman who Odysseus was. The story goes that he spent ten years fighting the Trojans before setting off for home. He loses his way and ends up here there and everywhere trying to get back. He’s offered immortality and all sorts of rewards if he’ll stay in one place or another. But Odysseus wants only to return to his rocky, barren home. He eventually makes it back. But he’s not quite the same man he was when he left twenty years earlier. Whatever other themes might be imbedded in the story, the permanent human longing to return home must be one of the most powerful. In the film, directed by Sean Wang, the marble that is quarried in Greece goes on a similar journey before returning to Europe in altered form.
The film is an astonishing visual treat. The director clearly has a penchant for repeated forms that represent very well the nature of modern industry. We begin by watching as blocks of brilliant white stones and pulled from a mountainside in Greece. Eventually these cubes give way to the huge stacks of colourful shipping containers that will carry the blocks to China. In keeping with the theme of cubes and squares, near the end of the film we return to Greece for a long shot of white apartment buildings in, I believe, Athens, before rising to return again to see a mountainside with huge gashes from which marble has been extracted. We also see, back in China, displays of identical toys and tchotchkes. There is something eerie about the transformation of a mountainside into so many identical mass produced items. This is certainly part of Wang’s goal.
The director also wants us to reflect on the nature of our highly globalized economy. As far back as the 18th century, Adam Smith wrote about the elaborate processes that went into making a simple woolen coat. Dozens or workers, if not more, contributed to making the tools and materials that went into the coat. Dyes, metals, sail boats. All were necessary to make the coat and the workers lived all over the world. We see this phenomenon writ large in this film, with materials being shipped to China, turned into statues, then shipped back to Europe. But here we see an extra step. One of the entrepreneurs who runs a business making western style statues based on everything from Venus de Milo (discovered on the Greek island of Melos) to modern art. On a trip to Italy, the entrepreneur is shocked to discover one of his own statues on display not far from the Colosseum. But with someone else’s name on it. Apparently reselling Chinese statues under the name of some European artist allows resellers to enjoy significant markups. Such is the nature of the modern economy.
A large part of the film focuses on this sort of commerce. The two characters who appear most in the film are Chinese-speaking Greek twins. In China, when not fending off suitors, they make presentations extolling the economic importance of Greece and claiming that Greeks prefer Chinese phones made by Huawei to Apple’s iPhones. Greece, it is clear, want to be part of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, that aims at creating a vast trade network over land and on sea.
Part of China’s goal is to grow its economy, of course. But we also see that Chinese people are quite interested in emulating Europeans. We see models of the parthenon, and an entire part of a city that looks like Paris, including an Eiffel tower. The desire for western style marble statues, made with Greek marble, is part of this aspiration. Although for Odysseus, there was no place like home, we see that for many Chinese people, there is no place like Europe. Whether this interest in all things western continues as China becomes more important on the international stage remains to be seen. But, to western eyes, the sight of young Europeans being completely fluent in Chinese and doing everything they can to court Chinese investment is quite astonishing. Perhaps before too long, those in the west will be longing for authentic Chinese cultural goods.