The Rock Blogger

Turning on the left indicator:
On Up the Yangtze’s politics in the chicken-in-the-corner doc mode

By Tyson Stewart

A cabin boy working on the ship tells a joke early on that goes something like this: the Chinese and American presidents are driving along the road of life. They arrive at a crossroads. A left turn means Communism. Right is Capitalism. The American president says let’s go right and the Chinese president says sure, but let’s turn on the left indicator. There is one thing in common with all the subtle moments tied together so effortlessly in Yung Chang’s film. The outer appearance of something surely doesn’t say everything there is to say about the thing’s function. Whether that thing is the political system, poverty, education, job protocol, or nature. Layered contradictions are everywhere. And when the cabin boy tells the joke, the film cuts to a shot of the back of ship going down the Yangtze River with a Chinese flag waving in the wind, denoting Communism. Then, to signify Capitalism, a shot of two Western tourists sitting in a lounge on the boat not paying a second’s thought to the two humongous Cosco containers that go by. The biggest political adversaries are intricately bound to the same vision of industry. The joke’s not-so-apparent, second hypocrisy has to do with the beginning. The US is riding in the same boat with China.

At its heart, the film is a dialogue between the director and his grandfather, a conversation about the changing face of China, its values and treatment of its people. It unfolds, creates this discussion through metaphor, but metaphor of a very real, direct kind. This isn’t exactly the flow-of-conscious film poetry of Sans soleil , yet Chang’s subject matter (China) allows him to see meaning in everything as well. What’s so beautiful about the film is how he builds point of view from the everyday moments. Knowledge that comes about via experience can prove a bitter process, like the Confucius quote says, but it is also the shrewdest kind, I would think.
Capitalism proper takes people away from the farm, alienates them and forces them to work on something that is miles away from what they are and what they own. This family’s drama is the latest and yet most timely metaphor of alienation’s spread. Gone from her property, the young girl works on the floating tourist trap. This isn’t capitalism though. It’s Commuinist China. Well, it’s modern China: Communism without Marx, without social justice as a backup.

But it’s not really about that either. It’s about an electrical dam project (a wonderful thing, if it cuts down on the air pollution that is engulfing the nation’s cities) and the luxury cruise boat that glides down the Yangtze River in between cities and people that, to its passengers, are already gone really. Yet perhaps it’s really about a young girl and a young Chinese-Canadian filmmaker who seek progress, the freedom to learn and grow, but also see that the consequences for this, today, mean giving up one’s roots and working toward new types of confinement. Up the Yangtze is about, quite surely, the state of things in the early years of the twenty first century.

Documentary modes abound. As the film mixes everything together, an intelligent self-reflexivity, aided by the control of the filmmaker, pervades nearly every frame. Voice of god starts things off, providing some autobiographical thoughts on tradition and modernity by reference to Chang’s grandfather. Soon, fly-on-the-wall comes along. A sharp cut from the river to a poor family farm and its inhabitants. Later, talking heads intersect with the rest of it. Pinches of poetry come and go. All around though, the film carries with it a slightly estranging vitality.

Chang will drop easily into melodramatic mode, where filmed reality is sculpted into story. Take the scene where the girl negotiates going to school with her parents at the diner table. The bluntness of the refusal leaves no time for cheap tricks à la Hollywood. She leaves home and the music swells up. She walks down the dogged path, reminiscent to something out of Yellow Earth .

A switch to vérité with the parents sitting around their chickens explaining to the camera the difficulties of sending one child off to school gives modesty a powerful rhetorical boost. This scene’s parallel, the shop owner talking head, reveals how personal problems for the lower class are truly the material concerns of that entire class. As such, the family becomes a sample, an example. While the shop owner cries for the nation, the family cries for itself: two of the film’s bravest moments. And while the shop owner sits by a statue of Mao, the family sits by the heavily breathing chicken, of course. I suppose, better to have chickens than icons. But Chang gives dignity to both of them. Soon, what they have will be memories.

Chang is always aware of narrative’s mythologizing effects. Sure it’s full of metaphor, but it never comes at the expense of the reality of the characters’ situation. Instead, the film’s poetry is produced by means other than the thing itself. Chang knows when to drop out of the “story” and when to pick it up again—he even tries to prevent his subject matter (Cindy, the girl) from becoming the source of all narrative logic. Chang’s use of many doc modes isn’t, by itself, a miraculous thing. We live in the time of Michael Moore, after all.

What makes the film unique is how Chang is always reaching out. With each new scene and with each new use of a doc mode, the filmmaker says something more about himself and/or about China. He doesn’t tell us how or why he arrived at the family. A zeitgeist without didacticism, Up the Yangtze paints a whole world out of a few subtly significant slices of life, like, the lady refusing to leave her house by the river, the various tourists (some funnier than others) and their interactions with the workers, and Chang’s own thoughts of this country through the reminiscences of his grandfather. In a Markeresque moment, he cuts to footage of a little girl dancing like her older sister might do. Chang runs a poem about change by and cuts back to the widening river. It’s the power of the freedom of free-form narrative that wards off myth so well: the element of surprise is always around the corner.

The camera is pointing, often, at the desire for progress and, achingly, at the realities of people’s station in life. These themes have true resonance in the world’s poor and middle class. Even an educated westerner has felt the growing pains of entering into the alienating modern market place. This little girl feels it too. She must scrub dirty dishes, learn a new language, and try to identity with her superficial teenage co-workers. The young man’s version of progress means surpassing his friends, achieving bigger income. His blind admiration for wealth makes him the capitalist of our story. He takes shit from the passengers but he also earns a good tip and he is content. When he gets fired, he rests assured that he will land on his feet. His parents aren’t poor farmers, after all.
Our hero’s coworker contends she ought to work harder than the rest because she lives in a shack, presumably. For the moment, the young woman remains skeptical to consumerism, as we see in moments where she raises an eyebrow to the price of a dress. She shows hostility to blind adherence when she is being forced to learn English, a practice in place simply to make the Westerner’s trip less bumpy. All these moments add up to a lot and show progress in its various forms. And by having a young poor farmer girl as the prime focalizor, the film has the distinction of social consciousness. When the badness comes, at least we feel it more penetratingly, unlike Manufactured Landscapes, which stays at a distance for its entirety then, lastly and awkwardly, tries to approach the Chinese people. It’s the social attitude toward life, in part, that makes Up the Yangtze one of the best films of the decade.

There is a somewhat unintentionally self-reflexive moment near the big flood reveal that sums up a lot about the nature of the documentary. In this scene, the father of the family carries a large dresser on his back up a steep concrete hill. He struggles at first but finally arrives. As the man climbs up the hill in real time, I became super conscious of the filmmaker, standing by, holding a 6-pound camera tapping the father’s struggle. In Buñuel’s classic documentary Land Without Bread, a man is shown shivering near a cliff. The narrator explains he is in the advanced stages of fever. The camera lingers on him for a few moments then cuts to a diagram explaining two different kinds of mosquitoes. The juxtaposition of these two images, the sick man and the diagram, creates in the viewer a sense of sheer perplexity. Likewise, in this moment in Up the Yangtze, the filmmaker does not (or cannot) help. His search for progress has landed him with a camera in his hands. Chang’s dialogue with the older generation finds an affecting parallel in this scene.

And as the film started with vast, epic shots of the dam and ship, it ends on a similar scale. The single family, Chang’s real focus, is nowhere to be seen. It is night. The dam doors open for the ship to pass. There is just the one direction and no way to turn around now. It ends with impersonal coolness on a large scale.♣

Up the Yangtze is currently screening at AMC Dundas Square in Toronto and at various international festivals.

Up the Yangtze - Trailer

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 9:42 am and is filed under Film, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.