更新时间:2024-02-16

他他 • 宇宙探索编辑部:[Film Review] Journey to the West (2021)

A soft Sci-Fi Chinese motion picture from an up-and-coming director, Kong Dashan’s debut feature is a critical darling in the 5th Pingyao International Film Festival (PYIFF) in 2021, which is launched by Jia Zhangke in his native province Shanxi back in 2017, aspiring to be the Chinese equivalent of Sundance Film Festival in espousing and discovering cinematic new voices both internationally and domestically, with its selections are restrictedly from medium-to-low budgeted debut and sophomore works.

Kong’s fantasticated film is about Tang Zhijun (Yang), an impecunious middle-aged editor of a démodé Science Fiction magazine in Beijing, who firmly believes in extraterrestrial intelligence and plunges into a trip to a rural village in the Sichuan province, where a purportedly preternatural event has occurred, which Tang conjecture has something to do with alien activities. Cued by its English title, the film can be deemed as a modern-day re-enactment of the eponymous 16th century classic Chinese novel. Tang is likened to the Tang Dynasty monk Xuanzang spurred by his monomaniac resolute. He is accompanied by 4 people (each corresponding to one of Xuanzang’s four disciples), Qin Caiyong (Ai), Tang’s chief staffer in his office, resembles the cynical Pigsy; Na Risu (Jiang), a bibulous observatory clerk, takes after the dependable and assiduous Friar Sand; Xiaoxiao (Sheng), a 23-year-old volunteer and a zealot of Tang’s magazine, is similar to the white dragon horse (barely getting any dialogue to utter); and Sun Yitong (Wang, also the co-scribe), the mystifying young man wearing a pot on his head, as both a receptacle of alien signals and a protection from the headache they engender, is an analogy of the Monkey King, playing up to his impenetrable myth.

From A to Z, JOURNEY TO THE WEST takes the form of a faux-documentary, with its characters constantly and directly talking to the camera to fill audience out with necessary backdrops, like Tang’s singledom is attributed to a failed marriage and a personal loss. Its teetering handheld camera movements are initially disconcerting, but when Tang and his co.’s trek is in full swing, they effectively and vicariously whisk audience in the moment, haphazardly moderating what can be seen on the screen through a medium-to-closeup gamut.

Tang’s idealism is well portrayed by a salt-and-pepper Yang Haoyu, whose pedantic demeanor is self-abasing and never irksome, salted with dry humor (his double-take intonation that he has already eaten a poisonous mushroom) and sizable pathos (the final tearjerking moment against a gleaming sun is achingly moving). But the true standout is Ai Liya, whose Qin Caiyong is equipped with the requisite pragmatism which mirrors audience’s natural skepticism about Tang’s idéée fixe, and Ai is superbly versatile in ladling out Qin’s sardonic commentaries and whips up more than enough boffolas along the way, while her constant berating cannot conceal Qin’s feeling for Tong, which explains why she has stuck with him for a long time, on a deeper level, she idolizes Tang’s idealism despite herself.

At the end of the day, Tang can come to terms with his unswerving existential quest, everyone’s raison d'être lies within oneself, which is stupendously educed by the film’s closing sequences going macrocosmic (from a place on earth toward the oceanic cosmos) then ending with a microcosmic statement (in the image of our DNA’s double-helix structure). Only time will testify whether there is any extraterrestrial life-force, meantime, the universe exists inside each and every one, as we breathe, metabolize and live, chasing after the ever-elusive poeticism, a nourishing haven for our impoverished spiritual life, a pointed issue in today’s China.

As a greenhorn, Kong’s direction is uncharacteristically self-assured: the farcical opening with Tong stuck in a frayed spacesuit and the rapidly edited montage cranking up the graveness of the matter (from ambulance to construction team) show up his comedic bent; his majestic use of jump cuts gives a boost to the sudden glance of China’s Southwest mountainous picturesqueness; and most cardinally, he engineers the supernatural elements with impressive legerdemain as its modest budget cannot afford expensive CGI creations. Also cleverly, Kong knows how to circumvent the strict censorship in China, by concluding its madcap tale on an ambiguous note (thanks to the magic effect of psilocybin), JOURNEY TO THE WEST can be advisedly construed either as castles in the sky (for those who adhere to the matter-of-fact tenets) or a rousing affirmation of Tong’s decades-long pursuance (for those who need to believe in something extraordinary), in a way, Kong’s magic realist gem is actually able to have the cake and eat it as well.

referential entries: Frant Gwo’s WANDERING EARTH (2019, 6.4/10); Stephen Chow and Derek Kwok’s JOURNEY TO THE WEST (2013, 6.6/10); Bi Gan’s LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (2018, 7.9/10); Guan Hu’s MR. SIX (2015, 7.5/10).