As the passage of history and time are both unstoppable, the dialectics of cinema, art, and politics. In this context, Chinese rich history and its cherished traditional theatre form are presented in A New Old Play by Qui JiongJiong, which is recently screened at Locarno Film Festival. The story takes place in two periods, before communist takeover and after in the Sichuan countryside with rich theatre and opera presence. Pockey, Crooky, and the Clown, as central characters, depict how individuals’ power, prestige, and social standings change with time and how their fates are bounded in the stage of local theatre and the wider social fabric of Chinese society.
From the outset, the large ensemble film presents superb acting and sharp, humorous dialogues to narrate a story of struggle and change. Early on, the discussion centers on becoming modern. However, what does it mean? Does it imply hiring more female actresses, defeating nationalist reactionary forces, or getting rid of old habits, colonial ties, and opium pipes? Amid all these visual and narrative clues, viewers could sense the class divisions that might have led to the communist victory. The Crooky character is the archetype of the oppressed. The Confucian top-down web of relationships is conspicuously present too. The training of a new cadre for the theatre shows the deep hierarchical set of relationships. Ironically, the liberation does not favor those victimized but takes away the liberty of those who were average common but hysterically targeted. The old society is gone, but at what costs to the theatre, its culture, art and collective harmony.
One of the unique aspects of the film, apart from being three hours long, is its theatricality. It seems that the film is being watched in a theatre. The set designs and movements illicit those feelings. In some scenes, the surreal imagery takes over. In others, the third wall is broken. The film’s aesthetic resembles its politico-historical context, chaos in the state of artistic presentation by agents who are devoured by their national histories. The decoration and mise-en-scene show these radical changes. The communist propaganda allusions and incorporation of red artifacts signify more to the scars than the realism of the changing period.
Qui JiongJiong explores and depicts this new old play’s impact on the family superbly. As intact as any Confucian institution, the clown and father figure seems to be under scathing attack and the mother as the protector of the order incapable of stopping the Red frenzy. The family is not only shaken by the hardship of the transition period, naming-shaming, loss of status, and change of theatre to an instrument of indoctrination; it changes at its core by the role reversal that Mao inspired in the younger generation to blindly disobey their superiors materialize people’s ethics and construct the Sichuan People’s theatre on communist ideals. Less and less, art seems to have the aesthetic value historically embedded, and it has more and more a stage to punish, erase and turn the millennial history upside down.
A New Old Play has two aspects that are difficult to be ignored by viewers and critics. First, it presents art, cinema, and theatre and acting as part and parcels of what makes a political subject, even in the remote locales of Sichuan. The stage of life is coterminous with the fast and rapidly changing stage of the theatre, one in which in one generation, everything artistically speaking gets annihilated. Second, it presents a pre-modern China, pre-communist China, both bygone but with a sense of ethics and nostalgia for the new generation. It seems another emancipation is needed in the Chinese society in all realms, “All life, in death, does not need to be a vanity.”
Score: A-